As the 2018 Gartner Peer Insights choice for meeting solutions, Zoom is a conferencing and collaboration service that’s built on quality. When it launched in 2011, Zoom was designed by engineers from Webex and Cisco groups, to create the perfect screen-sharing and video conferencing environment for online courses, webinars, video demonstrations, and video meetings.
Zoom’s portfolio integrates the various elements of meeting room functionality into a simple and effective platform on the cloud, perfect for small to mid-sized businesses and enterprises alike. Zoom is particularly effective for those in the healthcare and educational verticals, thanks to its underlying support for presentations and online training. Here, we’re going to explore some of the most exciting features of the Zoom platform, and what they can bring to your business.
Simple and Effective Cloud-Based Meeting Rooms
Zoom is a cloud-based video conferencing service, which gives it the versatility and scalability that many modern companies are looking for in this agile tech environment. With the support of the cloud, users can scale their service up or down according to their needs. You can even access specific Zoom plans for education, Telehealth, and developers.
Zoom uses HD video and audio to create a fully-immersive, yet easy-to-use conferencing environment for remote teams and busy enterprises. The native mobile apps and desktop solutions ensure that your organisation has what it needs to collaborate and communicate wherever they are. This is a crucial benefit for today’s rapidly-growing flexible workforce.
Zoom Conferencing Services
While Zoom is specifically designed to make conferencing simpler and more accessible for the business world, that doesn’t mean that the company compromises on quality. Every part of its conferencing portfolio is built with immersion in mind. Whether it’s the HD video and audio, the screen sharing capabilities, or the unique solutions like vanity URLs, complex user management, or single-sign-on, there are countless features to love here.
With Zoom, users can quickly and easily connect a range of conference rooms at once, adding remote attendees, enabling face-to-face meetings, and joining conferences with just one touch of their mobile device. The available services include:
- Meetings: Conduct high-quality conferences whether you’re connecting your team for a brainstorming session or conducting employee training rituals
- Video webinars: Launch your own lessons and webinars ideal for educational environments
- Zoom Rooms: Make the most of your zoom experience with collaboration-focused conference rooms designed from the ground up
- Business IM: Enjoy cross-platform messaging and file sharing solutions.
- SIP Connections and H.323: Bring your H.323/SIP video solutions into the flexibility of the cloud
- Developer platform: Enhance your app experiences with voice, video and screen sharing
What We Love about Zoom
Zoom’s portfolio allows you to create the video conferencing experience that works best for you. In a complex world, you’re not tied into a one-size-fits-all solution. That’s part of what makes the system so impressive. Here are some of our favourite features of the Zoom experience:
- Easily accessible webinars: One of the most exciting features of Zoom is its immersive webinar support. You can launch fantastic educational sessions either for students, employees, or stakeholders, with enough scope to support up to 10,000 view-only attendees and 100 interactive participants. You can also invite anyone to join the webinar with an URL link that can be copied and pasted into social media platforms
- HD voice and video: As the workspace becomes more diverse and dispersed, it’s important to make sure that your team members understand you in your video meetings. Zoom offers support for dynamic voice detection, as well as HD video, so you can ensure that every conversation is crystal clear
- Group collaboration: Zoom not only helps you to meet with your teams, but it also ensures that you have the resources in place to work together too, with the chance to send instant messages, images, and audio files to members of your group. With drag and drop functionality, you can instantly share everything from photos to documents, and you can annotate those files too
- Record your meetings: Make sure that you’re collecting the most powerful data for your business with the opportunity to record virtual meetings in MP4 and M4A formats. You can even access this feature through your mobile devices. Cloud and local recording make it easier to store video clips and manage your content
- Zoom Rooms: Design your ideal meeting room or huddle room experience with one-touch meeting initiation, wireless sharing, and even digital signage. Zoom Rooms allows you to enhance every meeting experience with touch-screens, native integration with Crestron technology, and more
Zoom Plans and Pricing
To support a broad range of business users, Zoom offers a selection of pricing options ranging all the way from a free “Basic” package for up to 100 participants, to an Enterprise package for larger corporations. The basic package comes with unlimited one on one meetings and 40-minute limits on group meetings, as well as online support. Other packages include:
- Pro: With all the basic features, plus unlimited meeting duration, admin feature controls, reporting, and customisable personal meeting IDs
- Business: With all the Pro features, plus dedicated phone support, vanity URLs, an admin dashboard, and managed domains
- Enterprise: With all the Business features, plus an extra 100 participants, unlimited cloud storage, a customer success manager, and bundle discounts for Zoom Rooms
Final Thoughts on Zoom
If you’re looking for a video conferencing experience that’s easy to use but packed full of next-level functionality, then it’s hard to go wrong with the Zoom experience. Whether you want something simple like a basic-level video conference, or you’re looking for a fully-immersive solution with Zoom Rooms, there’s something for everyone.
Zoom is an out-of-the-box solution for those who want to tap into the incredible benefits of video conferencing, collaboration, and communication. With this service, remote teams can finally eliminate the isolation of a dispersed workforce, and rediscover what it means to work together.
Have you tried Zoom yet? Let us know in the comments below!
