Conferencing tools like Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams offer a more effective alternative to email or instant messaging when communication requires more depth. These platforms support video, voice, screen sharing, and breakout rooms for both small teams and enterprise-level collaboration.
Conferencing Apps Overview
I find a lot of times we kind of revert to inefficient forms of communication. Sometimes it's great to send an email, other times it's great to send a text message or an instant message where we can just type something out real quick and then hit enter. But sometimes we need to explain something a little more elaborate, and yet we don't pick up the phone and make a phone call, or we don't set up a conference. There's a time and a place to set up some sort of conference where we're actually communicating.
One of the most popular conferencing apps is going to be Zoom. This is just the online version of this, but we could actually download the client and use it as well. If I want to schedule a meeting, I can schedule a meeting through this application and then send the link to somebody, and then we can communicate online.
So this is just one option that we have to do communication through conferencing. What we have is the option to see us visually — we can turn our camera on so people can see us. We have the option to speak over it, so we can communicate via voice. We have the option to share out our screen. There are other options, like we can have breakout rooms, where we get into breakout rooms and then discuss things in smaller groups. So there's a lot of different options that we have with this.
Let me show you another example. I'm going to jump over here to Gmail — you can see where I was setting up Zoom there — but in here, let's actually go to the apps button over here and select Meet. So this is Google Meet right here, and this is another way that we could actually do conferencing and set up a video call.
Teams is another way that we could go through this. A lot of enterprise level use Zoom or Teams, or, I guess, quite a few actually use this Google Meet as well. I don't have it set up for this right now, but we could set up a conference with somebody — here's the link right here to meet now — so this would have that capability of doing conferences as well.
In fact, most of our instant messaging platforms also have the video option, so we can do conferencing with multiple people.
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