Blog / Which video conferencing solution will you choose – The choice is simpler, and more complicated, than you might think
Every so often you get a asked a question that you thought had been answered a long time ago. Now just to be clear I’m not talking about people who don’t listen when you talk or anything like that; more like one of those odd ball questions that you honestly assumed had been answered and no one was concerned about anymore.
The other day I was asked about what would be good video conferencing software for an organization to invest in (or not invest in as the case may be). That’s honestly something that most organizations had decided on by now, one way or another. Specifically I was asked if it was okay for them to use Zoom or not. So I figured I would do a newsletter on the topic of using Zoom within an organization,
The problem Zoom had, in the beginning, was they were too focused on being “user friendly” and “easy to use”. Those were common themes in their advertising. Security and Convenience are very hard to mix together and Zoom’s default approach to security was laughable. This lead to ‘Zoom Bombing’ which could allow an anonymous attendee to take control of the meeting to the point where the presenter was not even allowed to stop the meeting, and was only possible due to the default security permissions that were in place on meetings.
Other software never suffered from this because their approach was different. Also, they were not as quick and simple to setup and configure; these days when it comes to the security and robustness of software there’s no real down side to using Zoom vs Teams or any other video conferencing solution. The major difference is in the interface and how you perform different activities.
The difference between the various options lies in their usage agreements. All the other video conferencing software providers agree not to monitor your meetings. The only information they will take are usage statistics (meeting length, number of attendees, and that sort of thing). This allows them to monitor load and usage to better predict if additional servers are needed and their infrastructure needs to be expanded. It also lets them publish accurate marketing material about how many people are using their service (the total number of user accounts is not an accurate measure of this).
Zoom, on the other hand, is different. For starters, when a Zoom meeting is finished the presenter has full access to everything that went on during the meeting. This includes all the video, audio, files and messages that were sent between the participants (even if they are private and not sent to presenter). Other platforms don’t do this and the presenter can only see things that were sent to or by themselves. In addition to this, ALL content within that meeting is given to Zoom. This is stated explicitly on their privacy page under ‘Customer Content’. So as long as your not going to discuss anything secret or pass around peoples health information or discuss important government policies and your comfortable giving all of
that content to Zoom, then I guess this is okay. (https://zoom.us/privacy)
In short, from a software perspective, Zoom is no different then Teams or any other call conferencing software at this point (except for the interface and what buttons you click to accomplish a task). However, I don’t feel comfortable recommending Zoom to anyone for use in their business due to the company’s position on customer content. The fact that they even consider the content theirs to begin with seems strange. Collecting usage statistics is a vital tool for predicting load and upgrading hardware (and other vendors do this, obviously). But the transcript of a video call is not needed (nor helpful) to figure out if you need to invest in additional infrastructure, and yet Zoom goes out of their way to explicitly mention the transcript on their privacy page. As a free option to talk to family/friends on short call (calls under 40 mins are free) I feel that Zoom is fine and fit for purpose.
To paraphrase The Bard, “To Zoom, or not to Zoom, That is a question”
If you have any questions about selecting video conferencing software, please reach out to your TRINUS Account Manager for some stress-free IT.
By Kind, Courtesy of Your Friendly Neighbourhood Cyber-Man.
