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.
Were you on a mac?
If so, you may have encountered https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_... which has been outstanding since October and has no sign will be fixed properly any time soon.
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
FWIW, IT can allow people in certain groups to make their own teams, it's an admin setting.
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.
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.
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.
Edit: downvoted for speaking up for student rights. Sorry if it is inconvenient for the teachers
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 [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]
Second, it does not support my browser.
That is not universally shared among others, including the non-technical folks that Zoom is being widely adopted by.
There's a parallels here with security in the uphill battle to get users to respect the caveats of the solution they choose.
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.
> to run Zoom in the browser [...] I have to use Chrome instead of Firefox.
Just a note, Slack and Teams calls also won't work in Firefox. It's really annoying.
Hangouts works fine in Firefox though, somewhat unexpectedly.
https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues/12975
And Teams calls:
https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues/25070
Slack originally relied on non-standard, Chrome-specific WebRTC behavior and now is prioritizing development of their Electron app over web support.
There is a Firefox extension to spoof Chrome's User-Agent string for Teams. I haven't tested it, but it appears to work for people: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/teams-phone-f...
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.
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.
The company is no longer 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
https://gsuite.google.com/learn-more/security/security-white...: "Google does not collect, scan or use data in G Suite Core Services for advertising purposes."
(Speaking for myself, not Google.)
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.
Most people use the standalone app because indeed it "just works". That's why you don't hear much about its browser client.
Most people use the standalone app because Zoom aggressively pushes it.
Not for joining a meeting, no. You just type your name.
Gallery view does not exist in the web client. Nor the ability to add cat memes to your background.
I have the native client and it still shows me this option.
It can be enabled, but it's not on by default.
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".
hangouts can’t handle many users (is it 10 the limit?), which is a deal breaker for me. we’ve tried and people couldn’t join the call.
if by microsoft you mean teams, i’m not aware of it working without accounts (not an issue for google as most people have google accounts).
My company had a 17 person Hangouts (Meet) meeting on Monday. Actually, we switched to Hangouts from Slack because Slack has a 15 person limit.
Is the limit maybe different for "Hangouts" vs Hangouts Meet?
Also, I think it's possible for companies to disallow guest users on their team instance.