Web Conferencing Software: What's Your Favorite?

SilverFleet said:

Up until now, we have generally been using Google Hangouts to do web conferencing, but the CEO has said that it's sometimes choppy and wants us to look into possibly investing in a better solution.

Spend more time troubleshooting this comment before you spend money on a solution.  With three of us working from home these days, video quality is directly related to demand load.  Try to isolate the choppy.  Is it one person?  When a lot are on at the same time?  We had one guy who started working from home and his home service was garbage.  He had to upgrade his service plan and now it's eleventy times better.  In my case, we also have a separate mifi unit so if my son is live streaming a class then I'll use that for a video conference so we're not both doing high-demand stuff at the same time.

If it's only sometimes choppy for the CEO, have him experiment by either switching to his phone on cellular or using it as a hotspot and getting off of whatever wireless network he's on at the time.

In reply to Sophie32 :

Do you use the Canoe Chat plugin?

slowride said:

We use gotomeeting. We also have some kind of cam/conference box setup. I'm fairly certain it's never worked. My cubicle is right next to conference room, I constantly hear "Just a minute, we're trying to get this to work" followed by "We can't get this to work so we're going to put you on speakerphone".

Bosses invested in GoToMeeting when it became obvious WFH was going to happen, so I don't have any experience with it on a standalone box.

But it works just fine using my work laptop over my house wifi / FiOS setup.  I even found an old USB headset from my PS2 that works fine with it.

Meetings are not difficult to create or join, you can easily share screens from multiple computers, and webcams seem to be pretty automatic too.

From having never ever done it to hosting my first multiuser meeting with screen sharing took about a 15 minute learning curve.  The coworkers having trouble with it are either idiots or their hardware isn't configured correctly.

We used to use G2M, now it's teams. I've had to use Skype and google meetings as well. I hate all of them equally. 

We have also been using Teams.

Duke said:

you can easily share screens from multiple computers, and webcams seem to be pretty automatic too.

On that note, which software allows you to change the focus to multiple incoming streams at the same time?  I'm having a hard time putting this into words.

In Webex, if you are sharing your screen, that becomes your focus.  People can see your webcam, but a very tiny shot of it.  They can focus on that, but then your screen becomes tiny.  Is there an easy way to make both of these equally large?

Ideally I would like software that supports multiple monitors, and puts the webcam view(s) on screen 1 and the shared content on screen 2.

Something like this would help remote presentations a lot, especially where different accents make it harder to understand the person speaking.

Additonally, is there a super-level of any of these web conf. softwares that allows someone to be the "admin" for a session.  Put people in the queue, etc?

The cool thing about using ZOOM is that the Chinese espionage community can follow along.

https://time.com/5818851/spies-target-americans-zoom-others/

Holy old canoe bump!

We've been using Zoom for a few years now. It's been fine, and company internal meetings haven't had any issues with Zoom bombers or any of that. For small, impromptu team meetings, we've been using Google Meet, which works really well for that sort of thing.

As far as equipment goes, we were using Huddlecam HD cams for our major offices which worked great. Now that we are all working remote, we're all slumming it with laptop/phone cams.

1988RedT2 said:

The cool thing about using ZOOM is that the Chinese espionage community can follow along.

https://time.com/5818851/spies-target-americans-zoom-others/

If Larry Ellison is cool with us using it for quarterly meetings where we discuss earnings and such like that, I suspect this isn't really an issue. 

Red Dead Redemption 2 is the latest and greatest for campfire chats

ProDarwin said:

Duke said:

you can easily share screens from multiple computers, and webcams seem to be pretty automatic too.

On that note, which software allows you to change the focus to multiple incoming streams at the same time?  I'm having a hard time putting this into words.

In GTM there is a second console window that has all the meeting info in it. [EDIT: including the participant cam feeds.]  You can drag that to a second monitor and maximize it, so I can only assume you could split a single monitor to have the shared window on one half and the console window on the other.

z31maniac said:

1988RedT2 said:

The cool thing about using ZOOM is that the Chinese espionage community can follow along.

https://time.com/5818851/spies-target-americans-zoom-others/

If Larry Ellison is cool with us using it for quarterly meetings where we discuss earnings and such like that, I suspect this isn't really an issue. 

People tend to believe what they want to believe.

https://theintercept.com/2020/04/03/zooms-encryption-is-not-suited-for-secrets-and-has-surprising-links-to-china-researchers-discover/

I've been part of the growing Teams base. 

The nice thing about it with my customer base is that most of ours already have Office 365 (therefore including Teams' paid license) and many are looking at tying their phone calling into the same Teams platform. For a workforce spread out across a large area, being able to join meetings, make & take calls, host conferences - all from your PC / Laptop / table / cell phone... works well. 

I've been living with it as a phone system for over a year. Occasional glitches on the mobile clients when in low connectivity areas or if you're ona Teams call, and get a cell call. Some phones don't handle that "gracefully"

Had a 2 hour conf. call today.  I was on site with a prototype and others were discussing it remotely.  I logged in to webex from my phone and from my computer.  My computer was hooked to a webcam providing a view from above-ish, my phone was to give a first person perspective.  I quickly found during the meeting that the camera intent is only so you can see someone's face when they talk.  I couldn't explicitly share the camera (making it the focus of attendee's screens).  That was pretty infuriating.

Also couldn't see my own camera feed when someone else was sharing something.

All the tech is there, but the functionality/app design is pretty bad IMO.

I really hope teams is better.

In reply to ProDarwin :

With Teams on the PC, you can definitely choose what camera device to use for sharing (though when *you* are sharing, you are full screen - helps to have a 2nd monitor or another device also on the call)

With Teams on a mobile, it uses the selfview camera. Only one video source "from you" is shared at a time, even if you're connected with multiple devices. 

I’m not super tech but Teams has been pretty painless for our 5 member sales group.  It’s been good for me with helping the younger guys with technical/sales stuff and they keep showing me new features in Teams.  Pretty much win win so far. 

Greg Smith (Forum Supporter) said:

In reply to ProDarwin :

With Teams on the PC, you can definitely choose what camera device to use for sharing (though when *you* are sharing, you are full screen - helps to have a 2nd monitor or another device also on the call)

With Teams on a mobile, it uses the selfview camera. Only one video source "from you" is shared at a time, even if you're connected with multiple devices. 

 

 

I'm not so concerned with which camera - I can select which device on Webex.  What I wanted to do is share my camera view, full screen (i.e. like facetime).  Not share content from my screen.  The focus seems to be on sharing screen content (which is what we do like 90% of the time).