The Best Video Conferencing Solutions For Your Meetings At Home

The COVID-19 Pandemic has forced many countries around the world to shut down almost completely. This has impacted and imposed inconvenience to many businesses across industries. With stringent lockdown measures across the world including India, businesses have opted for a work from home policy or as they say ‘WFH’. It has now become a necessity. However, most corporates, especially in India, do not have enough experience to handle a work from home business.

When employees join remotely for a meeting from different parts of the country, they need to have proper technical support at home. Any delay in having that might disrupt the workflow. Companies in India are facing difficulties regarding this and that is the reality that these businesses have to deal with amid the lockdown. With businesses losing time and revenue, they do not have any other way out apart from this.

Working from home is not as difficult a task and can be easily managed with the right mix of technology and equipment. All you need is a good WIFI connection, good equipment, and reliable software for a smooth workflow.

Video Conferencing apps are a key work-from-home tool because they help you to keep track and schedule meetings with fellow employees and clients. With so many choices available in the market for video conferencing, it is important for you to check each of them and use the one that best suits your needs.

Some video conferencing apps are easier and more user friendly than others, and while people are forced to work from homes, it is important to experiment with the ones which are your best bet. We have listed down a few of those apps for you to make a judgement call.

Google Meet

Google’s video conferencing app within G Suite has been designed keeping the business enterprises in mind. You can host up to 250 participants simultaneously depending on the subscription you’re on.

Amid the coronavirus outbreak, Google announced that the Enterprise functionalities will be available for all G Suite users on a temporary basis. This means that all the G Suite users could now host a meeting inviting up to 250 participants per call, can record and live stream their video meetings until September 30th.

Google Meet has an easy to use interface and is fully integrated with other G Suite apps like Google Calendar so that you can easily schedule your meetings with your team and send that link to them. Anyone having access to the link will be able to join your call. With Google Meet you can also share your screen for presenting something. However, only one person can share their screen at a time.

This app also uses text-to-speech technology which allows the users to read whatever conversations are happening. This is a very useful feature for people with hearing disabilities to follow instructions.

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is a video conferencing solution which has many service plans. Team is a part of Microsoft Office 365 having both free and paid plans. Both the plans allow the users to host a meeting with up to 250 participants. You can also record team meetings and calls and the recording gets saved to Microsoft Stream and you could share that meeting with the users who couldn’t attend the call or even for your future use.

Team is fully integrated with Office 365 and the core capabilities include business messaging, calling, video meeting and file sharing (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, SharePoint and other tools).

Zoom

Zoom is one of the most used video conferencing apps right now especially by businesses. It’s easy to use and the video and audio quality is also pretty good. Zoom also has a lot of interesting features like screen sharing by multiple people at the same time, has an annotation tool and background feature. It also lets you use GIFs. There is also an option for running polls while in a meeting.

However, as the usage of Zoom increased right after the pandemic outbreak, some serious security issues got exposed. It is said that many hackers have tried to invade into certain meetings. Intruders were able to access meetings that weren’t password protected. Zoom defended itself by saying that they use end-to-end encryption (the most private form of internet communication), but the encryption that they use is Transport Layer Security (TLS). This is different from end-to-end encryption as the Zoom service can have access to the unencrypted video and audio content.

This poses a huge security threat to the users, especially for businesses and becomes very risky for them to conduct meetings using this platform.

Airtel Unified Conferencing Solution

Airtel launched its video conferencing solution recently offering HD audio, video, and web conferencing solutions. The company has partnered with Zoom and targeted business customers. This unified solution offers one-click access to meetings, video conferencing, and audio conferencing. One can host up to 1000 participants in a call from across the globe. The users could also give an option of live streaming for up to 50,000 viewers.

However, as Airtel has partnered with Zoom, it is difficult to ensure the privacy and security of the meetings. Partnering with Zoom may not have been the best decision taken by the company amid the recent security breach by Zoom, thus making Airtel Unified conferencing app a little less reliable.

JioMeet Video Conferencing Solutions

After causing a stir in the telecom sector in India, Jio has moved towards expanding its services in the form of apps. JioMeet is an HD video conferencing app that allows users to add up to 5 participants for free on the JioMeet app. With your corporate subscription, you can add up to 25 participants from any device on the app or browser. Users can invite their fellow colleagues from their contacts by sending them an invite link via email, SMS, or even on social media websites. For more participants, Jio also offers corporate plans in which you can host a conference call with up to 100 participants.

Attractive Features

With JioMeet’s cool features you can make your ‘work from home’ days easier and more productive. Some of the key features in the video conferencing app include chat messages during conference calls, admin controls for the host like muting or unmuting a participant, locking conference rooms for uninvited guests so that you can have maximum privacy, and much more.

• WebRTC Support: With this feature, any participant having the link can join the meeting from their browser (Chrome/Firefox). The participants do not need to download the application to join the call.
• B2B Calls: Apart from in-house meeting feature, you can also conduct meetings with other businesses, clients, partners, and anyone and everyone outside your office.
• Join From Any Device: You can participate in the call using any device, be it a laptop, desktop, or even your phone. You can either download the app on your device or open the link sent by your host on your browser.
• Schedule Calls Flexibly: Want to conduct an impromptu meeting with your team? Just send the link to the participants and get on a quick unscheduled call. You can even schedule a meeting at a predefined time and send the invite via email, SMS, or through social media platforms.

Made Just For Your Business

As the lockdown has been extended, companies need to have their employees work from home to ensure that their operations are disrupted to a minimum. More companies are switching to video conferencing apps like JioMeet because they can:

• Stay connected with their team and take conferencing calls beyond the walls of a conference room. A meeting can be set up anywhere in the world at any time.
• Interoperability: If they have invested in a high-cost video conferencing device, they can also be a part of the meeting from legacy devices as well.
• Better Experience: With a well-established back-end technology, you can get an HD video quality through optimization even with lower bandwidth.
• Easy To Use: Anyone and everyone can use JioMeet easily because of its intuitive and user-friendly interface which enhances the overall conferencing experience.

JioMeet is for the Indian audience and Indian businesses, it is a reliable source to conduct your everyday meetings without having to worry about your video and audio data being hacked. It doesn’t matter if your company is extremely new to the now mainstream work from home scenario, you can easily connect with them using JioMeet. Even if you’re used to the work from home environment it will be a smooth sail for you and your team to get the tasks done in time easily and effectively.