Facebook Portal makes for a better virtual office
We moved to a virtual office a couple of years ago; it’s just a natural consequence of people wanting to be more mobile, and not wanting to lose great people due to commute or location.
Since then, we’ve used all the standard communication tools, Slack, Hangouts, Zoom, email, and, of course, communicating through our task management platform (which happens to be Asana).
That works well for general inter-company communication, but for inter-team connection, where people work closely with a couple of other people, we lost something.
About two months ago my co-founder and I started using a Facebook Portal. I had heard of it, but not much about it; it doesn’t get much press and no one’s talking about it, much. It may be due to all the bad news around Facebook privacy. Facebook has been running specials on it lately where you can get two for a much lower price, and we decided to give it a try. What I found surprised me:
- The build quality is high; it feels solid and well built, more so than the devices from Amazon or Google (IMHO).
- It has a fisheye lens that tracks your movement keeping you in the frame.
- The sound is fantastic for a device its size.
- It has voice control and integrates with Alexa as well as having its integrated apps, like Pandora.
- The screen is big and crisp, and because of the auto zoom and facial recognition, you are always front and center.
- It has a hardware button to mute the video but not disconnect the call.
- While we can do video conferencing in apps on my computer, it is nice to have it physically separated from my laptop.
- You can go from Messanger app to the hardware if either party is mobile.
- You can do conference calling; others on our team have been adding Portals, and it’s been replacing Slack and Zoom for small group conference calls.
Since getting the Portal, its a mainstay. When I get in, its the first thing I do, establish a call with my co-founder. It says on all the time, and we just mute if we’re on another call or want privacy. It’s not quite the same as working in the same office, but it is much better than other standard channels. I hope this helps others in a similar situation.
Here’s a link to Facebooks Portal website if you're interested in finding out more about it.
