Item: Zoom Events & Webinars
Rating: 8
Author: Chris McCarthy

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I attend a lot of video webinars and often host some. I use them as remote training tools. It is often difficult to get all attendees to start at the desired time and those incessant delays can be disruptive. We needed one that would address that issue as much as possible, though with all of the heterogeneous corporate environments out there we knew the issue would not be entirely solved.

Pros and Cons

Their mobile version is lightning fast, even for first-time users to get started and join a video call multiple times in a day, even on short notice.
Popular! That matters because when we use it in large groups for training, we find that most already have it installed.
Clarity and quality of the video sessions are excellent! When training, audience attention really matters.

It’s a great technology, but I recommend they work on simplifying scheduling. It is always a challenge, not nearly as streamlined as it could be. If zoom worked on that one improvement they would have seriously raised the bar for all other video communication tools.

Return on Investment

Easy to get started, especially the mobile version.
Free version works just as well as the paid when it comes to video quality.
Feature rich, worth the price.

Alternatives Considered

GoToMeeting and Cisco WebEx Teams (formerly Cisco Spark)

Zoom is unbeatable when compared against the long-established vid communication players on speed, video quality, ease of use and even price.

Other Software Used

SeoSamba for Wordpress Enterprise, iMovie, Norton Internet Security

Likelihood to Recommend

Great for training, especially of large groups. Great for mobile video users as it is fast and keeps the quality of the training videos (therefore audience attention) very high. Great for last minute, quick video call sessions used when just such a session would add visual clarity that a nonvideo call just can’t. If you are less familiar with how their scheduling process works, I highly recommend you practice for a week or so before you host a time-critical training session or another video call. The main purpose of video webinars is that it saves the audience travel time while still delivering the “human contact” experience. So making sure you know how to make the scheduling seamless, will keep the audience from having to rebook and save the time it was intended to.

Lightning fast mobile with great video quality everytime!

Overall Satisfaction with Zoom Video Webinar