Not that I'm in favor of this practice, but the one key feature that conference software must have is: it just works™.
Nothing turns you off more from a conferencing solution than: any problem getting it working right now.
When there is just the slightest issue, one person not being able to join, one person not getting voice to work, bad audio, your entire team is blocked/distracted. Which results in a collective distain for the solution and video conferencing as a whole.
This extends to getting the solution working for greenfield installs as simple as possible. Because who knows which non-tech users from which department all need to join and can't figure out how to set the permission in their browser right or install/use the other browser that is compatible.
So sadly, from a functionality point of view, you want have the software be able to force itself onto the user in the most usable state it can.
I'm still curious why everyone thinks Zoom "just works" while others don't. Because in an enterprise context it is often hard to download an executable and run it with sufficient permissions. While Google and Microsoft both offer a product that "just works" with only a browser. What makes Zoom more "just works" than that?
I'm a college professor, and I'll share my perspective.
For one, Zoom did just work. (At least as a participant, rather than an organizer.) I tried it out, and it immediately worked. It did what all of us were expecting, with no fuss.
I also tried MS Teams. It seems designed with a different philosophy: that you use the software to do many different things, and you want them all integrated. (For example, it posted my meetings automatically to my Outlook calendar. I had never used this calendar before, and was only dimly aware that it existed.)
Moreover, it seems that the expected setup is a bunch of people, all at the same workplace, who communicate with each other consistently. My needs are different, with wildly disparate use cases: a departmental meeting; classes to teach; an online conference (https://www.daniellitt.com/agonize/); an online social gathering. Many of the people with whom I communicate don't work for the same employer. And I don't want to configure all of these "teams" in advance.
That said, I tried to get MS Teams up and running, to teach my class. This involved multiple emails back and forth to our tech support (it seems that I can't set up a "team" myself; I have to ask IT to do it for me). It didn't have its own whiteboard functionality so I had to download and run some separate software.
And, then, in the end... it didn't work. I was trying to teach a class, but my students couldn't see what I was doing. I had no idea why.
The workaround is quit programs until you find the one that somehow causes Microsoft Teams to not understand that it really does have permissions. For me it seemed to be XCode. But it could be others...here is a partial list:
- Harvest – Confirmed
- Sonos – Confirmed
- Cisco VPN – Issue reported by others
- Microsoft To-Do – Confirmed
- Contacts+ (formerly FullContact) – confirmed
- Apple Photos – confirmed
- Teamviewer – reported by others
- Prompt/popup for app review from App Store – still have questions here. This seemed to be it, but haven’t been able to confirm
- Brackets – reported by others
- Citrix Workspace Version: 19.10.2.41 (1910) – confirmed
This is an example of why "just works" is so important.
You're right, MS Teams is definitly better placed as an org-wide communication/collaboration tool, not an external one. They really need to make it easier to communicate with people in external orgs, the org switcher is my biggest complaint.
FWIW, IT can allow people in certain groups to make their own teams, it's an admin setting.
Working within the US NIH, we are forced to submit a ticket for creating any new teams and the entire Teams/Office 365 ecosystem is entirely crippled for us. All new features take forever to be approved and brought online, as well as additional connectors and apps having to go through an extensive 6+ month-long vetting process before being approved.
Makes using Teams quite a hassle, but with Skype for Business being the only other approved option for internal chat, it's better than nothing.
Those are all organizational decisions, and not out of the box defaults. Microsoft is trying very hard to persuade organizations not to make those decisions.
Completely free teams creation does come at a cost. It makes data governance much more complicated. People creating duplicate places for things they didnt know already existed. A lack of naming convention, to be able to analyze what exists. Microsoft is pushing for people to just be able to get things done, at the expense of organization.
When they mention "connectors and apps", right now there is a very serious amount of phishing fraud going on involving one click links that ask you to authorise a malicious app. Users see a "please click yes" prompt, they never have to enter their password and they think that sounds fine.
I wish Microsoft would try a lot harder in persuading businesses to make the decision to take oauth approvals out of the user hands, because the volume is at a point where I really feel anyone following the "empower the user" discussion almost certainly has a compromised mailbox in their business.
Teams specifically is the spiritual successor to Skype for Business / Lync / Office Communicator - its main benefit is integrating with Outlook, Exchange, OneNote, and SharePoint. If it's not deployed with that in mind, that's a lot of wasted effort, IMO.
> If the students want privacy, they are just helpless.
This isn't true actually. As a student, send the following email:
"Hi Professor, I just read this webpage [link], which outlines some privacy concerns with Zoom. I know some other classes are running Software X, could we try that instead?"
My university isn't mandating Zoom. Indeed, they recommended several software packages, of which their top recommendation was Blackboard. (Which is what I've been using so far. I have mostly joined others' Zoom meetings; I've only initiated them for a D+D game I'm participating in.) MS Teams was their second recommendation as I recall, and Zoom was below that.
At least at my university -- and I expect that this is typical -- individual faculty members are deciding how to best fulfill their own responsibilities. And I have emphasized to my students that I have never done this before, and that I'm happy to change what I'm doing if people have good suggestions.
> "Hi Professor, I just read this webpage [link], which outlines some privacy concerns with Zoom. I know some other classes are running Software X, could we try that instead?"
Hi [Student],
I appreciate your concern; however, our university has conducted a thorough audit of this software and found that it satisfies our needs. We will continue using it for our lectures.
Regards,
Dr. [Professor]
Senior tenured chair of [Department], distinguished lecturer, [University]
universities are organisations, which all force some incarnation of an internet usage policy. better still, the students are paying an arm and a leg for their lack of privacy. wouldn't it be great for the non-technical end user if these Just Works™ software could just bypass firewalls by way of VPNs, common ports, obfuscated servers or the like?
This is what I was getting at with my parent comment, it "just works" for everyone. But it doesn't fit some of the niches technical or privacy minded people have. And in the end, we are bound by the common denominator. I can push my open source privacy respecting solution all I want. But unless it "just works" for the lowest tech user I'm at a loss.
There's a parallels here with security in the uphill battle to get users to respect the caveats of the solution they choose.
We just had a corporate presentation with around 250 people. Normally we use Teams or Slack for internal communication, this was also stated by management, that Zoom should only be used for 'big' meetings like this. I think they know the other solutions will not work as well for bigger groups. I've not had issues with using either solution for small group meetings.
Actually I have to go out of my way to run Zoom in the browser instead of using the installer. I have to use Chrome instead of Firefox, download but not install the app and wait for the "or run in browser" link to appear after that.
I really don't like macOS installers anyways and passionately hate them as "installing" and App on macOS should be nothing more than moving the .app from a zip or disk image into your /Applications folder. I just don't trust them in not placing additional crap like auto updaters or kext's when I don't need them.
App installation should always just be a file copy. Deinstallation should always just be a move to Trash (or ~/Disabled equiv).
IMHO.
I'm even uncomfortable with config scattered everywhere. The continued need for those 3rd party uninstallers is an admission of failure.
Source: released products ported to misc Windows, classic Mac, modern Mac. Our dev, QA, Test, tech supp was always so much easier on Mac. Not least because we could have multiple current versions installed. Which allows troubleshooting, rollbacks, etc.
Caveat: I personally use package managers and am curious to see if Nix becomes the norm. So I may change my mind in the future.
If the file is only moved to trash it will keep configuration and other artefacts around or not support such features or the file ahs to be mutable, which is questionable from a security pov
Thanks. I've been chewing on your reply. I didn't get very far. It finally occurs to me that macOS (or equiv) could implement iOS (or equiv) style sandboxing. Maybe that's already in progress. As a dev and former power user, I'm sure it'll be uncomfortable.
Why not use Teams Live for this? We have been using zoom and Teams alternately and Teams performance and ease of use has been much better in my experience, but we have yet to do a 200+ all hands so I was curious if there were some footguns with teams live that you may know about. Teams live works on a lot of platforms and also has a web version.
My wife was on a Teams videoconference last week. 125 people in four locations from New York to Southern California.
An hour into it, half of the people were simultaneously dropped, and not from any particular geography. It was random. And nobody could reconnect for a very long time. It took 45 minutes to restart the meeting.
have only recently started using teams with one client. small group (max 6 folks I think) and... we've had issues with it - someone's video freezing, audio garbled/dropping, etc - twice in 2 days. but... I'm sort of chalking it up to potentially overloaded/bad net connections in the wake of all the WFH and remote meeting stuff being used. We had issues with connecting to zoom (and their phone numbers) last week as well, so I'm not ready to pull the plug on teams entirely until we have more experience under our belts.
To be fair I’ve seen the same thing happen with Zoom. During a 2 hour meeting with a client, about half of my team was dropped and couldn’t get back into the meeting for several minutes.
Teams live events (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-live-e...) which the parent comment was refering to is actually a specific feature in Teams that is only available for certain levels AFAIK but supports vastly more people than a standard Teams meeting.
The predecessor, Skype Broadcast allowed completely anonymous viewing, basically a twitch or youtube stream. In the name of growth hacking, the Teams team decided to force people to the app, you couldnt watch the video stream from a mobile device without the teams app. Which is a huge amount of friction for a mobile workforce that isnt using teams.
Maybe this has changed since I last talked to Microsoft, but even their own team was unhappy with it. But if you still have access to broadcast.skype.com, it still works, until they decide it shouldnt.
The only Teams Live meeting I've ever tried to join, we had two people who gave up because their web version didn't support Safari without having to manually go deep into their preferences and change settings from the default.
Well, I have a feeling that the praise for zoom going around is not from people working in enterprises, it's people working for everything-but enterprises, who just want a solution that works.
In my experience (also not enterprise), Zoom is the simplest solution with the best quality and latency, compared to the alternatives. The UX could be better, but the performance of Zoom for all platforms makes you survive the UX.
As someone who has used a variety of VTC products (Zoom, Webex, BlueJeans, Teams, Skype, etc.) for several years on a daily basis (lots of external VTCs with different companies who use different VTC systems), Zoom is by far the best. The audio and video quality is head and shoulders above the rest (both on PC and mobile) and the interface is dead simple for even the least tech-savvy users.
My company uses Zoom, and there have been many instances where, during a VTC call set up by someone at another company (that doesn’t use Zoom), we have switched mid-meeting to Zoom because there’s something wrong with the other VTC system (someone can’t join, can’t hear, can’t speak, can’t share their screen, etc.). And the other options haven’t gotten noticeably better over the years either.
In my experience, every other solution I've tried is a train-wreck, compared to Zoom (MacBook Pro w/ external Apple monitors). And, as far as I remember, I've tried them all, repeatedly.
Even first-class platform-specific solutions like FaceTime are, basically, unusable vs. Zoom. Its amazing, actually. I'm not quite sure how Apple managed to make FaceTime's audio just not work (almost ever), and Zoom just works, every time, on every platform.
> I'm still curious why everyone thinks Zoom "just works" while others don't.
I'm also curious. I subscribed to Whereby (https://whereby.com/), where I can send people a URL, which they click and land in my conference room. There is ZERO software they need to install.
[For all the "well, actually" folks: yes, it "only" works in every modern browser out there, and it works "only" for up to 12 people. Fine with me.]
Zoom has more features, but there are many other solutions that work much better and are WAY simpler. It's just that Zoom is well known, and it's easiest to choose the tool that everyone has heard about.
Some of my teachers use jitsi, which works on the same principle. The teacher sends a link, you click it, and that's it. Works very well, and no limit.
From my perspective, working in the browser is not necessarily "just working", because for many combinations of OS/hardware, the performance is terrible and not only eats battery and will slow down other programs, but also affects the quality of the call (audio and video).
Also, granting a website access to my camera, granting access to my microphone, and so on; which are really not functions I want to be granting any websites. I don't run a browser to have it randomly turn on surveillance devices. I prefer to run an app to access my camera and quit it when I'm done.
Don’t Google and Microsoft answers both require accounts, and carry with them the expectation that everything you do on their platforms is recorded for the purpose of selling ads?
Also I regularly attend more than 50-person zoom calls without a hiccup. Google I think requires an enterprise plan to get to that limit, and I don’t even know what the name of their video conferencing product is at this point.
> Don’t Google and Microsoft answers both require accounts, and carry with them the expectation that everything you do on their platforms is recorded for the purpose of selling ads?
For Google, the answers are "sorta but not really", and "no":
https://support.google.com/meet/answer/9303164: "Note: Guests on the web don't need a Google account to participate in a meeting." The initiator of a meeting needs a G Suite account, but others can join without one.
> While Google and Microsoft both offer a product that "just works" with only a browser.
But those products don't always "just work", at least not in my recent experience. I have had repeated problems with Google meetings while working with an external entity, and most of my employer is a Microsoft shop, so I've had deal with issues with both Teams and Skype, both via browser and OS X app.
Google requires you to have a Google account. Kids in middle school (ages 12-14) and younger typically don't have an email address. Zoom, on the other hand, lets you join a call without logging in. You can even join straight from the browser if needed without installing anything.
That's weird, when I open a meeting link (which would open the native client) at the bottom of the page it says "If you cannot download or run the application, join from your browser.".
I have the native client and it still shows me this option.
The visibility of this link is disabled by default unless the person trying to join attempts (and fails, even if deliberately) to download+install the client at least twice.
Google has messenger and hangouts and another video conferencing solution that I don't recall.
The reason we ditched hangouts for zoom a few years ago was that hangouts only supported up to ten users, including users whose connection had died and so they had to re-enter the room again. This became extremely annoying - having to stop a conference mid-call to ask some people to disconnect so others could enter, or trying to find out how to kick "ghost" users, was definitely not "just works".
teams has another issue though: when someone speaks, it cuts the sound for the other people speaking in the same time. in theory this sounds good, but many times it will cut the sound of the active speaker. yes, i think this can be managed with group mute, but zoom doesn’t have this “feature”.
It just amazes me that the "just works" solution here is still a native app. Plenty of reasons to use native apps but in 2020 video conferencing really isn't one: WebRTC is capable and supported by every major desktop and mobile browser. It's literally one click and you're done!
None of the WebRTC based options just work, they're all glitchy and cannot scale up to even moderate amounts of users. We have Google Hangouts Meet for free for our org, and we still pay for Zoom because It Just Works.
Even having the "unblock this site from camera and microphone" burried in the browser chrome or settings pages somewhere is a dealbreaker. It's too easy for people to mindlessly click "no" to can this access your microphone, because of the way the browser pops it up during first use, instead of during "install."
True. Even the adblocker and autoplay blockers can prevent video and audio from working in Hangouts. I have had issues with hangouts when joining meetings with important people — and my browser’s autoplay block feature prevented the video feed from working.
Yeah. And high fidelity sync between audio (ideally via phone). Maybe someone does it, but we tried _all_ vendors and settled on Zoom. And screen annotations, and the ability to remember participants' phones and dial them directly (replaces them having to type 9 digit numbers into their phones), etc.
Also, Zoom has reached a critical mass where, particularly for sales calls, the remote party is quite likely to have it installed. The network effect here is really valuable.
I guess it works for some. I've had two Zoom meetings this far, and in both cases the organizer quickly changed to Jitsi as Zoom had distorted audio.
Maybe some incompatible software/hardware at some end? I don't know or even care really, but Jitsi worked well with the same participants both times, while the anecdotal Zoom success rate is still 0% for me.
For meetings I host I'm trying to evaluate Jitsi as well, so far without much luck. I'm not hosting that many meeting and the one I did was with someone using Linux not getting screen sharing working.
But Jitsi is on my shortlist as I think being open source and self-hostable is the way forward for a tool that could knock Zoom of it's throne.
This still isn’t a good reason to build a native app instead of just using webrtc.
Someone should make a PSA site that says something along the lines of “don’t install teleconferencing software because it usually bundles malware; your browser already has the technology built in.”
In theory. But in practice, as a developer you don't want to depend on the browser support for your whole product. Conferencing features of browsers have been pretty lame, compared to what's possible in a professional product.
{edit} My experience: investor took over our startup, made us switch from bespoke technology to web-based conference features. Every feature was compromised, reliability and capacity reduced by 10X.
Browser blocking and plugin features can prevent it from working. For example, I’ve been in hangouts meetings where the video feed wouldn’t load because autoplay was blocked on the browser. Of course, you can work around that, but having the Zoom desktop client provides a reliable experience without any tweaking
For better or for worse, WebRTC is very opinionated about codecs and transports. Those might be great choices for some scenarios, but no developer wants their whole business to be constrained it.
Nothing turns you off more from a conferencing solution than: any problem getting it working right now.
When there is just the slightest issue, one person not being able to join, one person not getting voice to work, bad audio, your entire team is blocked/distracted. Which results in a collective distain for the solution and video conferencing as a whole.
This extends to getting the solution working for greenfield installs as simple as possible. Because who knows which non-tech users from which department all need to join and can't figure out how to set the permission in their browser right or install/use the other browser that is compatible.
So sadly, from a functionality point of view, you want have the software be able to force itself onto the user in the most usable state it can.