Zoom

Zoom is an incredibly popular web-based communication tool designed solely for hosting webinars, virtual meetings, video conferences, teaching online courses, and training remote employees. It is an easy-to-use and integrates video conferencing, online meetings, and group messaging into a cloud-based platform. Zoom is super helpful to small, medium, or large businesses and enterprises, educational establishments, and even healthcare organizations. The software is built to host and broadcast meetings of up to 200 active video participants and approximately 10,000 attendees. However, they cannot interact during the meeting.

Zoom offers, therefore, high-quality video and screen-sharing functions, improving team collaboration between in-house and remote employees and view-only participants. Everyone can join in a meeting in an instant just by using their portable devices or web browsers. And Zoom enables users to share content in wireless mode, enhancing remote access to webinars and conferences.

The software is built entirely for video meetings and conferences, and thus it incorporates features that help remote teams stay productive and close-knit. Some of the most interesting ones are the quick invite, meeting recording, screen-sharing, turn-off video, mute audio, meeting reminder, and auto-copy invitation URL when starting a meeting.

Moreover, Zoom also has third-party integration with popular business tools, such as Google Drive, Trello, PayPal, Slack, Microsoft 365, and Zappier, to name a few.

As mentioned before, Zoom is an incredible tool to use for enterprises, freelancers, educational employees, international teams with remote colleagues, or individuals wanting to speak with family and friends.

But without further ado, here are the best advantages of Zoom

Phenomenal Webinars

Zoom enables users to participate in webinars from the convenience of their homes. The size of participants that can join a webinar is up to 200. On top of that, up to 10,000 view-only attendees are allowed to attend the video conference. Users can also invite other participants to a webinar by using the URL link generated by Zoom. It can be copied and posted to social media networks or instant text messengers like Facebook Messenger or Microsoft Skype. Also, they can email the URL links through Zoom's integration with email clients, such as Gmail or Microsoft Outlook.

Dual-Screen Support

As mentioned above, Zoom facilitates the hosting of dynamic webinars, but it also comes with a dual-screen support system, in which users can view both the speaker and the rest of the participants. Plus, the software has HD Video and HD voice with effective voice detection, providing users with crystal-clear images and high-quality sound and voice.

Screen-Sharing

Moreover, another fantastic thing about Zoom is that it enhances webinars with screen-sharing functionality. In this way, users can share their desktop screens with the audience. So, they can show participants their presentations, diagrams, or documents. Zoom's webinar ability encourages remote access and content sharing, facilitating the broadcasting and viewing of educational content and company conversations.

Group Collaboration

An additional feature of Zoom is group collaboration. Users create groups and send documents, images, or audio files to group members. In addition, they can invite Zoom users to join the group, giving them access to a webinar via their mobile devices. Furthermore, users can share the aforementioned files instantly with drag and drop. And they can even annotate them with the addition of comments.

Record Your Meetings

Video meetings may take place with screen-share from the host's desktop or mobile device. In this way, teamwork is improved, eliminating communication barriers between teams, employees, and clients. Finally, Zoom can record the virtual meetings in MP4 and M4A video formats and store them in the cloud or locally. Consequently, users can revisit the videos for future reference, especially if they are about schooling. Also, users do not need to rely on third-party apps or recording devices to capture their webinars, which is superb.

However, not everything about Zoom is perfect. A concern educational employees have about the software has to do with the invitation reminder function. They do not consider it attractive. Instead, they argue that it would be nice if Zoom offered a ring feature option where a ring appears on the screen once a user is invited to join a meeting.

Another downside of Zoom is that it is not that smooth as an app. And it can be challenging to manage the screen in terms of the controls. For example, there is no easy way to see the participant you are sharing your screen with and what is being shared. Also, during meetings with several people, Zoom makes it hard to manage them. In the end, everything becomes unclear as the voice chats overlap, making it hard to pick up what the participants are saying.

Zoom was founded in April 2011 as Saasbee, when Eric Yuan, a former vice president of Cisco Webex, left Cisco. In May 2012, the company changed its name to Zoom, and in November of the same year, it signed Stanford University as its first customer. By 2013 it had one million users. Seven years in 2020, amidst the global pandemic, Zoom became the most well-known conferencing app. In October 2020, Zoom was valued at $140 billion. The company is located in San Jose, California, United States.