Most collaboration tools share common features. Recently, Zoom has increased the number of concurrent users for collaborative purposes. Previously, the limit was 50, but now it's 10,000. You can host multiple thousand people with a licensed or free version. This is beneficial because both teams and individuals can use the service. Zoom has aimed to cater to both corporate sectors, where licences are prevalent, and individuals who may be using the free version, such as students, faculty, or small to medium enterprises.
The video quality and stability of Zoom are good, but they depend on the communication network and backbone infrastructure. Sometimes, when we use Zoom and don't have a good backbone facility, there can be issues. Zoom provides different background screen functionalities for privacy protection. These are standard functions worldwide. You can opt for new backgrounds, customise settings, and establish privacy preferences. In terms of collaboration and reviewing, Zoom offers standard features similar to other collaboration tools.
Zoom has frequent updates, occurring every week or twice a week. This poses a significant issue because sometimes when we attempt to initiate a call, the system begins an upgrade process, taking at least 30 seconds and sometimes up to two minutes. This unscheduled upgrade can be inconvenient for users, as they must wait for the update to complete.
When users who don't have the plugin available, they sometimes encounter difficulties using the browser-based system. They don't need to download any additional applications for the purpose of meeting. Zoom should invest more in this area.
Secondly, the primary target customers are the enterprise or business sectors, rather than students. Microsoft is heavily targeting the business sector. However, if these users eventually adopt Zoom for educational purposes, they will need to use the same application.
I have been using Zoom for 3-4 years. We are using this latest version of the solution.
The product is stable.
I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.
The solution’s scalability is high. if you record everything, It's encrypted. It is in the Oracle database, which is a piece of mind for me that my communication, my recording should not be. Security breach should not be there. I can set all the security parameters accordingly.
200+ users are using this solution. We are using two hours a day.
I rate the solution’s scalability a seven out of ten.
We used the Microsoft team because it is built-in hardware and is easy to manage.
The initial setup is easy and takes very little time since It is a simple configuration. Zoom has a backend agreement with Oracle. Oracle is managing end-to-end infrastructure and cloud services of Zoom. Any user can deploy the solution depending on their expertise.
It is managed or maintained by Oracle and Zoom itself but on the client side, updates are a bit annoying.
Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.