In the midst of a shutdown, video conferencing sites have exploded in popularity.
There are two significant players in current applications within the United States: Microsoft Teams and Zoom. These two platforms’ total users jumped from 10 million in December 2019 to 200 million in March 2020.
From an end-user perspective, the market perception that Zoom is easier to use.
Zoom is more of a jack-of-all-trades video conferencing tool for both internal communication and external personal use.
The current leader in video communications is Zoom. Zoom offers video, audio conferencing, Collaboration, Chat, and webinars via their cloud platform. Services available in Windows, Mac, Linux desktop and laptop platforms and iOS and Android mobile devices.
Zoom can handle up to 49 users on a single call and breakout rooms for users to split into smaller groups. Zoom offers a free service with up to 100 participants. However, it is limited to 40 minutes per call. For unlimited calls and webinars, the pricing increases, starting at $14.99 per host per month.
Microsoft Teams comes included with MS Office 365 and integrates quite well within the Windows Active Directory for users, groups, and security management. It is optimized for secured collaborations in real-time to find, share, and edit files using Office Applications, like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.
While Zoom was built video-first and indeed provides the best of breed video conferencing, Microsoft’s Teams’ strength is its management, security, extensive conferencing (up to 1000 participants to join), and Collaboration.
The Best of Both Worlds
Zoom is available as an application in the Microsoft Teams App Store. Once installed, the integration allows users to start a meeting or join a scheduled meeting from within the Microsoft Teams persistent Zoom Meetings tab or using @mentions from any Teams channel.
In the Microsoft Teams Zoom Meetings tab in Outlook, users can start, schedule, join meetings, or share screens. The Zoom Meetings tab also lists all the Zoom Meetings in the calendars.
Companies have unique challenges and needs, so there is no blanket answer to which service is better. It’s common for companies to use Teams internally and Zoom for communicating with clients and vendors.
For most companies, it does make sense to use both to their advantages as the two services complement each other quite well.
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