Calling all Teams, Slack and Zoom gurus

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There’s lots of competition right now for free collaboration/meeting software. Microsoft says that use of Teams has spiked 40% in the past week. Slack
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Elly

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It is tough because what works well for one company, does not work well for another.  Internally, Teams seems to be our best option.  Externally, BlueJeans and WebEx are our go to tools.

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woody

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I worked for an organization for about 13 years, and was one of the individuals that often designed, ran and/or moderated webinars/meeting for 10-500+ individuals.

Long story short – both platforms have strengths/weaknesses, but overall Zoom is my go to. A few reasons why:

1 – Superior video/audio quality and stability

2 – Recordings are saved in MP4 format (although I think WebEx can do that now also, they used to only record in a proprietary format that you could convert with their tools) in the cloud or on your local system. So, it easy to put up webinar recordings on social media, etc. Also, you can multi-cast a Zoom meeting live to Facebook and YouTube.

3- Breakout Rooms. You can actually run full blown seminars, trainings, etc. and have small groups work together then bring everyone back. The instructors can visit each room to see what’s going on (equivalent to walking around a physical room). Each breakout room can also record their session.

4 – Support. Overall, Zoom support staff are far more responsive and easy to get to.

5 – Neat Tricks. Buy a $15 green screen, put it behind you, and you can have any background you want. Messy office? No problem, put up a skyline. Want to have the background be your org logo? No problem. Want to do the weather? You get the idea!

6 – Multipurpose. You wouldn’t have a one-on-one ‘Skype’ type call using WebEx, it’s overkill. But the Zoom client for iOS,  Android, Windows, Mac works equally well as a Skype replacement (upgrade!) as it does for joining team meetings or massive webinar presentations. It’s versatile and scaleable.

I have transitioned into another position over the past year, and have not run so many webinars, so it’s possible WebEx continues to play catch-up to Zoom … but Zoom is just a more pleasant platform to run a meeting from or be a participant on.

My two cents!

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Mr. Austin, woody, Tom, Elly, AlphaCharlie

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Plus, I did a quick eval of several solutions recently, and Zoom currently offers a completely free-forever basic version (no recordings) with a only one major limitation: a 40-minute time limit on any meeting with three or more participants.  For a cost-conscious firm like ours, that’s at least a great starting point!

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woody

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The real deal when it comes to privacy is Wire. Based in Switzerland (sorry NSA) and developed in Germany by former Skype and Microsoft people (sorry Skype and Microsoft).

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Mr. Austin, woody

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[warrenrumak]

The large company I work for uses all three extensively.

Zoom is the preferred platform for video chat. Our CEO is hosting hour-long Zoom calls with thousands of people connected at once, and everything is working well.  The instant messaging features of Zoom are not used at all….. it really doesn’t help that you can only have the Zoom client logged in for chat on one machine at a time.

Slack is the preferred platform for general text chat. We have a Zoom plugin for Slack, so whenever people want to do video chat, they just type “/zoom” and off they go.  Tons of people are posting pictures and videos of their home offices, as well as screenshots of their Zoom meetings.

Teams is more like the “glue” for Office 365.  Some people do use it for chat, but the preference expressed by IT and corporate leadership is Slack.  Teams  is widely used for project management and coordination.  We also use it to power our IP phone system…. you call any of our sales & support numbers, it’s powered by a Microsoft PBX.

I know people think of Teams and Slack as direct competitors, but they do have a ton of divergent features.  Slack is much stronger at ad-hoc structures and is very easy to get channel-specific workflows up and running… but you can’t receive calls from the outside world and its “everything is a message” concept makes it more difficult to provide custom user interfaces.  Slack’s administrative tools don’t scale super well to very large (10,000+ user) environments.  For instance, you can’t disable “@channel” so if a newcomer to the company wanders into a channel with 10,000 people and uses @channel…. thousands of people get notifications on their phone or desktop. Not good.

Meanwhile Teams has a full calendar built in and full integration with your Office 365 “recently used” list, which is nice if you want to get back to a document you looked at last week.  But, Teams doesn’t have a concept like “#random”, so you end up having to structure conversations around projects.  This is a better system for large companies with tons of different things going on.

Therefore, I’ve come around to the view that Slack is better for small companies and Teams is better for large companies…. but there’s also nothing wrong with keeping both around.

I will say this though: In the last two years, Teams has improved -much- faster than Slack.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 1 month ago by warrenrumak.

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Mr. Austin, woody

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We have used Slack without a problem for about four years.

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woody

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We used webex with 58 concurrent users. All went well. Teams was down at the time for 30 minutes. So its webex for us.

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woody

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Webex seems to be little complicated, but it works nice without bugs and you can rely on it – we use it for more than two years and it works just like you expect.

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One of my avocations is choral singing and I’ve been studying voice for about 40 years now.  My voice teacher moved all lessons to Zoom starting this week.  My main PC is a workstation and not optimal for Zoom.  I used my android phone with Bluetooth earbuds so I would not be tethered to the phone.  I propped the phone up on a bookcase shelf so I could stand and sing.  I was surprised how well it worked.  The only issue was working on my song for the week.  I had to play the accompaniment on a second device and could not get the volume high enough so I had to have one ear piece from that to hear the piano.  My voice teacher could hear me but not the piano.  This is a bug to work out before next Thursday.

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Mr. Austin, Elly

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In addition to Slack we use Skype.

Our practice is to use Slack for client/group meetings of up to 50 people and Skype for one-on-one conversations including press briefings. We also use Vonage for voice over internet telecommunications.

Now that we are spending more time working remotely, we have enhanced both Slack and Skype’s capabilities by upgrading all of our web cams to Logitech – C920 Pro devices in order to improve the image quality of our notebooks and workstations.

In addition to our neighbors who normally work from home, their children are now attending school and university online and the summer homes in our area are now occupied full-time with people who are telecommuting as well as there children who are attending school, streaming videos, and playing games online. Overall, there has to be a huge increase in the data volume moving over the system in our area.

In recognition of its customer’s increased data demands, one of our two local high-speed internet providers, Comcast, is now providing all its subscribers unlimited monthly data for no additional charge.

Our offices and staff are outside of the urban and suburban communities and are at the end of the fiber and power distribution systems. Right now we are experiencing internet download speeds of 155 Mbps with traffic being routed through a server located in Norway.

So far, we have not noticed substantial local congestion however we periodically have to change our VPN server locations due to congestion.

Has anyone experienced internet congestion while using their collaboration/meeting software?

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We have tried all of these and all have issues. MS products seems to be the worse. 1 (bad) -5(Best) Stars and MS scores -10 stars

• -10 Stars–
  • Teams- Too many issues with crashes, slow load times, and connections issues.
• -10 Stars-
  • Skype – Same as Teams but it is MS so that figures. I wish Skype was not bought by MS, it worked better before MS bought it. Not it has gotten worse with showing people being online but they are not. Others as being offline for 2 days but they are online for over 3 hours.

• 2 Stars–
  • Slack – It seems to be better but had issues internal but worked with with external clients.
• 2.5 Stars –
  • Zoom – It works better with internal but had issue with external clients.
• 3 Stars –
  • Webex – This works best but had some slow downs this week as more employees started to use it.

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We’ve settled on Zoom, after having used consumer Skype, GoToMeeting, VSee and slack. We’re a non-profit, and Zoom’s pricing and licensing structure works well for us.

I concur on what’s mentioned about Zoom above.  Besides that, we also like the security, the capacity for whiteboarding, and the capacity for screen sharing. Screen sharing is really useful.  Most of the time, it tends to be shared document content in a meeting, or sometimes, somebody that’s taking notes during a meeting. However, since it’s possible to request remote control, it’s also a good (although basic) way of doing troubleshooting. We also have a dedicated remote access tool that works really well, but for some tasks, it’s often faster to just share a screen in Zoom (especially if there’s already an open connection) than it is to start up a more formal remote control session. Breakout rooms are also nice to have.

Before we moved to Zoom, we were using VSee. VSee positions itself for telemedicine, including security that’s sufficient for stuff subject to HIPAA regulations. They’re excellent on security, using VPN connections, and they’re good for video on connections with limited bandwidth.  When we left them a couple of years ago, their chat client was mediocre (and part of why we were doing chat with Slack), but it’s improved a lot since then.  In our experience, Slack is (was) the superior chat client, but Zoom is suitably close, unless you really need to exploit all of Slack’s advanced features.

When we dropped Slack, they were still just getting into audio/video, so I don’t have experience with their current product, but I’m guessing that it may be a little less than Zoom, which started with audio/video first.

GoToMeeting works fine, but is really only suitable for group meetings, and not individual discussions.  Zoom has the feel of bridging the group features of GTM with the more individual connectivity that we have found in consumer Skype and VSee.

I don’t have any personal experience with Teams, but my external observation indicates that Teams may work well when you’re working in a Microsoft enterprise environment, but less so, if you don’t have all the Microsoft pieces in place, including Outlook, Exchange, Active Directory, and other MS products.  As others have noted, it’s probably best for large orgs, but for smaller ones, other products may be better suited.

All in all, we’re quite happy with Zoom.

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Mr. Austin

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[8string]

Howard have you used the latest version of Teams? Could you compare/contrast them?

howardagoldberg wrote:

I worked for an organization for about 13 years, and was one of the individuals that often designed, ran and/or moderated webinars/meeting for 10-500+ individuals.

Long story short – both platforms have strengths/weaknesses, but overall Zoom is my go to. A few reasons why:

1 – Superior video/audio quality and stability

2 – Recordings are saved in MP4 format (although I think WebEx can do that now also, they used to only record in a proprietary format that you could convert with their tools) in the cloud or on your local system. So, it easy to put up webinar recordings on social media, etc. Also, you can multi-cast a Zoom meeting live to Facebook and YouTube.

3- Breakout Rooms. You can actually run full blown seminars, trainings, etc. and have small groups work together then bring everyone back. The instructors can visit each room to see what’s going on (equivalent to walking around a physical room). Each breakout room can also record their session.

4 – Support. Overall, Zoom support staff are far more responsive and easy to get to.

5 – Neat Tricks. Buy a $15 green screen, put it behind you, and you can have any background you want. Messy office? No problem, put up a skyline. Want to have the background be your org logo? No problem. Want to do the weather? You get the idea!

6 – Multipurpose. You wouldn’t have a one-on-one ‘Skype’ type call using WebEx, it’s overkill. But the Zoom client for iOS,  Android, Windows, Mac works equally well as a Skype replacement (upgrade!) as it does for joining team meetings or massive webinar presentations. It’s versatile and scaleable.

I have transitioned into another position over the past year, and have not run so many webinars, so it’s possible WebEx continues to play catch-up to Zoom … but Zoom is just a more pleasant platform to run a meeting from or be a participant on.

My two cents!

• This reply was modified 5 years, 1 month ago by 8string.

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As usual, It’s all about what your requirements are. Are you wanting to simply have a one to many or many to many video conferencing with not much additional features being used? Maybe Zoom is your go to. Microsoft has done a *ton* of work on Teams in the last year, have been strengthening it’s infrastructure and has a huge treasure trove of videos on it are on the 2019 Ignite site on Youtube. You can get to it from here.

Ignite Video Sessions

Do you not have a lot of MSFT users at present and want to do text based group chatting? Maybe that’s Slack.

Do you already use MSFT products, have the logins for them, pay for Office 365 and simply want to bind your teams together for project oriented collaboration and some video conferencing and calling? Maybe Teams is the right choice.

I’m using Teams heavily these days, mainly as a project task manager for my projects internal to the company I’m at, so I’m using Planner.  I like having a Wiki built in to capture project specific issues, it’s a place to put files very specifically to the project , and I can easily collaborate with others working remotely. Much more fun than email!

the video conferencing works fine for my limited needs. I can also use Skype to take control of a machine that might not have Teamviewer on it.

All in all, those features are what I need. I don’t spend a lot of time videoconferencing others. If you are getting Teams as part of Office 365 I have no idea why you wouldn’t try it out.

I have no problem with people using Slack if they like it, and many people not using MSFT products regularly seem to favor it. It’s in widespread use in small businesses here in the Pacific NW.

Stay healthy folks!

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Zoom for TeleHealth seems to be the best fit primarily because of its end to end encryption. Health industry Cyber-Security teams are more willing to adapt video conferencing apps that incorporate end to end encryption considering HIPAA and PHI. I assisted a healthcare department from the ground up and users had little to no issues using Zoom. There will always be a few pleb questions, but overall it was a smooth start.

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Mr. Austin

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MS Teams stoped working due to large number of users.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/16/21181300/microsoft-teams-down-outage-europe-remote-working-coronavirus

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woody

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[8string]

A European outage. Yes, the infrastructure servicing  Europe used to be physically located there. I assume that it still is. This isn’t a surprising set of outages given the sudden increase in volumes . I was on  Teams for a lot of Sunday doing end user training and there was no outages here in the PNW.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 1 month ago by 8string.

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doriel

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doriel wrote:

MS Teams stoped working due to large number of users.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/16/21181300/microsoft-teams-down-outage-europe-remote-working-coronavirus

For two hours, but that was more than a week ago.

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My own experience:

Skype has/had abysmal video quality, and often has especially poor sound, and always prefers to automatically update at the least opportune times, i.e. right before an important call. That delays the call and sometimes needed a reboot. Nope to all those things.

I adopted a paid (Pro) Zoom subscription and have found it to so far (~ 2 years) to be rock-solid reliable in both its mobile and desktop versions. The only caveat with Zoom is that their tech support is both slow or non-existent. Meaning they’re charging me for a feature they don’t provide, which is never acceptable. Of course their absence of support gives me pause that I would want to continue to use them, and it also encourages me to keep an eye peeled for alternatives.

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I do not know if any of you have ever visited or worked on an oil, gas, LNG, or electric power trading desk. If so, you will remember banks of computer screens and high-tech phones.

Now our clients, including those in Singapore, London and New York, are working from home and have become dependent on their laptop vs. workstations and a single screen vs.multiple screens carrying real time data on market activity, news feeds, ext.

The results are that many of our clients, as well as our staff, are having to develop off-site access to trading platforms and other technologies. In addition, their employers are having to provide key equipment and communication systems to facilitate interactions, including audio and video conferencing, for their trading teams as well as their shipping, credit, and other departments. A technology nightmare due to the sheer volume of data traffic from home-based users and a new exposure to internet gremlins and terrorism.

Think about it, the trading floors are normally in a high security locked room with access only for those who need to be there. You cannot just walk in. And if you are a “visitor” who follows someone through the door onto the platform all h*** breaks lose, security is called, and it can take much more than a half hour to unravel the mess.

The firms are increasing using Speakerbus’ ARIA (“cloud-delivered virtual endpoint, providing the same global “hoot” and advanced telephony”); Cloud9 Technologies’ Cloud9 system (digitizing voice with a purpose-built communications platform for the trading floors as well as cloud-based voice systems); and Speakerbus (voice communication & collaboration) that replaces traders’ traditional phones. The systems provide access to key contacts at the push of a button and record the conversation (a requirement of all trading desks).

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It is a bug that impact Windows 10 users according to Zdnet:

New Windows 10 bug hits home working: Outlook, Office 365, Teams can’t access internet

What a great time for Windows 10 users. I am glad that my company never plans to deploy the broke Windows 10. Company is still using Windows 7 and several Windows Xp computers for programs that do not work on newer OS.

Windows 10 is the worse OS that was ever made in my opinion. Bring back Bill Gates to get things back onto the right track. Things were little better when he was around.

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For a number of reasons, Zoom is not an option for my application.  I am trying to understand what version of Teams (or Office/MS 365) I need to license.  I am using Win10 and have gigabit bandwidth to the net.  The application is 2-3 instructors teaching a class to 5-25 students each morning for a week.  Most of the material will be presented in PowerPoint or via screen share using other apps such as Excel.

Any tips (other than try different software) are appreciated.

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