Whether you’re working from home or the office, having access to a reliable and versatile video conferencing solution is critical to keeping an open line of communication with colleagues and clients, staff, and suppliers. Video conferencing solutions enhance workplace productivity, allowing team members to brainstorm and share ideas in real time, creating a collaborative experience that results in higher quality projects and stronger bonds.
Video conferencing can also allow your team to win more deals by being able to easily set up and run seamless meetings to wow potential clients, and offer your specialists a more personal way to troubleshoot and resolve customer issues. Video conferencing tools have quickly gone from a luxury item only affordable by the largest businesses to something used on a daily basis by small, medium, and enterprise-level businesses worldwide.
There are many video conferencing tools on the market, each of which carries its own unique features and benefits – from new players on the market to tried and true favourites, every business will have their own unique needs that such a tool has to meet. There are many things to consider when you’re choosing the right video conferencing solution for your business. You’ll need something reliable, easy to set up and use, secure, and versatile. With all these considerations in mind, we’ve managed to narrow it down to our favourite four.
RingCentral Video – a versatile video conferencing tool
With the ability to host up to 100 participants in a high quality meeting room for free for up to 40 minutes with industry-leading uptime, RingCentral Video immediately stands out from the crowd. Add in reporting features, single sign-on, advanced team messaging, and unlimited meeting durations for paid plans, and you have a real winner on your hands.
With RingCentral Video, your team members can easily share their screen to better communicate new ideas and concepts, make and receive calls on any device at any time, and avoid overloading their email inbox with integrated team messaging. And video conferencing is only one feature of RingCentral – it can be used as a cloud business phone system, which can assign extensions to everyone on your team that will ring through to any number they want. Put simply, your team members can accept RingCentral calls on their cells without your clients even knowing they aren’t calling a business extension. This is a huge benefit for teams that are working from home.
Zoom – the choice of users everywhere
At the beginning of the pandemic, users everywhere had one thing in common – they were all using Zoom to keep in touch with family, friends, and colleagues in a world that had suddenly shut down. Zoom has remained the popular choice for users and some businesses, largely because of how easy it is to use for a wide variety of purposes.
Unfortunately, Zoom is less versatile than some of its more business-oriented alternatives, though it does feature handy engagement tools like polls, reactions, and easy file sharing. Zoom’s paid Business plan can accommodate up to 300 participants and comes with some very useful business features, though highly desired features like cloud recording, audio conferencing, cloud phone system, and webinar hosting come with a steep price tag.
Google Meet – an essential part of the Google Workspace arsenal
Google Meet, Google’s video conferencing solution, was once known as Google Hangouts Meet. It has quickly become an integral part of Google Workspace, formerly G Suite. Meet allows your team to stay connected without worries about security or reliability, backed by Google’s unparalleled security and cloud global infrastructure. Creating meetings in Meet is easy. Set it up, share the link, and launch your meeting – there’s no downloading software or plug-ins, meaning any of your clients, team members, and partners can join without derailing your call. You can even create a Google Meet meeting from within Google Calendar.
Meetings can be joined directly from Google Calendar and Gmail and launched from any device. Even better is that Google Meet is perfectly integrated with the rest of Google Workspace, letting you jump directly into meetings from Google Docs, Chat, and other popular Google apps. Google recently announced that going forward, Meet will be the default video conferencing solution for Google Workspace users, ensuring that your business doesn’t incur additional IT costs that come with using external conferencing solutions. For teams already using Google’s wildly popular office suite, Google Meet is the obvious choice for a reliable and feature-rich video conferencing solution, especially if your business is already running on Google Workspace.
Microsoft Teams – a solid choice for businesses running MS Office 365
Finally, Microsoft Teams serves as Microsoft Office 365’s video conferencing solution, offering a way for Office 365 users to easily connect, collaborate, and work on projects together. Invitations can be sent out via email and joined by just about anybody, allowing teams to connect with clients and colleagues remotely. Teams features meeting management features that allow you to mute attendees, designate presenters, and allow for automatic joining or virtual lobbies.
Teams live events can accommodate audiences of up to 10,000 attendees, making it a great tool for holding presentations and conferences with people outside your business. Unfortunately, Microsoft Teams is better suited to businesses currently operating within Office 365, meaning that it can be tough to use and connect to for those outside your organization if you are planning on using it for anything more than a video meeting or presentation.
If your business needs help choosing the right video conferencing solution that meets your technology needs, look no further than the business communications experts at ion8. ion is an all-in-one business consultancy with a full team of experienced consultants, developers, and designers ready to help you implement and integrate the perfect video conferencing solution throughout your organization, letting you and your team stay connected and take collaboration to the next level. For more information on how ion8 can transform the way you do business, contact us today.