Digital Togetherness – Social Distancing Made Easy

Digital Togetherness – Social Distancing Made Easy - DIY Masks

You’re working from home and need a great way to connect to your co-workers? Social distancing has made video conferencing more important that ever and the Quincy Business and Technology Center is here to help!

Here are some top picks:

Zoom.us – Free for one-on-ones with a forty-minute time limit for meetings of three or more – up to 100 participants. You can integrate invitations and other functionality with Microsoft outlook and some browsers. Share screens, have great video and audio even with a large number participants. You can also see all the participants while you chat – and you can create private chats on the conference. Check out their pricing at https://zoom.us/pricing.

Microsoft Teams – a relatively new entry in the space, Mirosoft offers Teams in their Office 365 packages with a way to connect to your office and coworkers from anywhere with unlimited participants. Teams allows you to file share in real time, creating efficiencies with your staff. Teams is much more than conferencing. Teams also has a free version but is limited in administration tools. Find out more at https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/download-app

GoToMeeeting offers about the same videoconferencing. It may however have more technically advanced features like sharpness and backlight cropping to name a few. You can screenshare and of course use the whiteboard offered by GoToMeeting. Further, GoToMeeting has some great options for dialing in and calling as well.  Find out more at https://www.gotomeeting.com/.

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Adobe Connect is yet another option, Connect does a great job for virtual classrooms, however pricing and perhaps too many options that you might never use, along with pricing make this a lesser contender in the video conference game. You can however customize the conference in a number of ways, and have unlimited video feeds. Find more at https://www.adobe.com/products/adobeconnect.html.

There are so many more applications to compare and contrast – but that’s good, you can try them for free, then make your decision!

And stay tuned for our reviews of conference call options in our next blog post!