Any recommendation for video conferencing? We are using hangout and it is not reliable at all :(
On the free plan there's a one hour cap to meetings, which is ideal as nobody wants to be in a meeting longer than an hour.
I regularly use Hangouts, Slack calls and Zoom and I totally agree. Especially quality of Slack calls is awful. Just earlier today we had a call, where audio was delayed ~2s while video was perfectly fine.
And Zooms grid view is so nice. I wonder why their competitors don't offer the same functionality.
The 1h cap is no issue. Great time to have a 5min break before starting again.
Every person i talk to who sets it up the first time always struggles to click the "audio by computer" button and i have to spend the first 2-3min explaining how to get their mic working. But it saves the setting after that. Only ever an issue once per person.
The main critique I have is their push to monetize as of late has been clumsily executed in my experience of the product. The expanded "pro" features have shifted around without enough heads up. The chatroom ownership system is not at all clear in how it interacts with paid accounts. We abandoned a few rooms used widely in our org until we figured out whose random account we had used to own a room earlier (from a prior push by Appear for room ownership) and got ownership transferred to a paid account.
I'd recommend looking at the Logitech BCC950 (about $200) or one of the Jabra Speak table conference mics (about $100 but you also need a camera). Polycom IP phones and desk conference devices are also worth looking at, but they get very expensive.
We got some high end blue tooth speakers that are crap (but cost upward of 4.000€ for 4 pieces). I just asked Google for these things and found them to be Sennheiser TeamConnect Wireless. At least connecting to them with a MBPro when you also want to use AppleTV wireless just isn't a solution.
Never hat so much hassle with setting up conferencing. Give me a good landline for voice and a camera/Tv setup for image.
My experience with them is that they are not that great - you need to be wary of being close to them and speaking in their direction or they'll have trouble picking up your voice.
Screen sharing is a bit unstable, but conferencing is rock-solid. It's connected to our phone system so people can call in and out [2].
I also highly recommend the Owl 360 degree video camera/speaker: https://www.owllabs.com/
As a remote employee, the Owl makes it much easier to be a part of a discussion around a table where most of the meeting participants are in a room at HQ, and a few of us are remote. (I know some of the employees, so I'm biased, but I like to think I would love the Owl even if I didn't know some of the team.)
We use both in the company I work for and it is a pain in the ass to use. and the image quality isn't really that great.
But both are at least usable.
More important is imho that people know how to use the tools. Give people room to interrupt/ask questions. Make breaks in between your thought units a little bit longer. Because you won't have non-visual signals that someone wants to ask a question. And on the other hand: Give people the chance to bring their thoughts to an end. Don't interrupt premature.
Be more considerate and kind. Go out of your way to compensate for the non-visual signals of communications, that regularly help a lot in f2f situations.
We decided to try old school - we hosted our own Mumble and while maybe not nice UI/UX, it works perfectly for 20+ people. Also I recommend as well having good headphones (with integrated mic) to avoid potential echo (jitsi echo can be annoying without headphones).