> It's good quality, and you can still see other participants during a presentation.
I regularly use Hangouts, Slack calls and Zoom and I totally agree. Especially quality of Slack calls is awful. Just earlier today we had a call, where audio was delayed ~2s while video was perfectly fine.
And Zooms grid view is so nice. I wonder why their competitors don't offer the same functionality.
I second zoom. I found it has the clearest video for screen sharing. I use it alot for pair programming. At least once a day. Really easy to share control and read the other screen.
The 1h cap is no issue. Great time to have a 5min break before starting again.
Every person i talk to who sets it up the first time always struggles to click the "audio by computer" button and i have to spend the first 2-3min explaining how to get their mic working. But it saves the setting after that. Only ever an issue once per person.
No-install, no sign-in is amazing. Appear is one of the services I've referred people to the most, for just that reason.
The main critique I have is their push to monetize as of late has been clumsily executed in my experience of the product. The expanded "pro" features have shifted around without enough heads up. The chatroom ownership system is not at all clear in how it interacts with paid accounts. We abandoned a few rooms used widely in our org until we figured out whose random account we had used to own a room earlier (from a prior push by Appear for room ownership) and got ownership transferred to a paid account.
Others have recommended a bunch of services. I'm going to recommend that you also take a look at your conferencing hardware. A good speaker/microphone/camera set up can really make a difference. You need to spend at least $200 (but can spend upwards of $1000).
I'd recommend looking at the Logitech BCC950 (about $200) or one of the Jabra Speak table conference mics (about $100 but you also need a camera). Polycom IP phones and desk conference devices are also worth looking at, but they get very expensive.
Exactly that. And don't let high price or fancy bling bling blind you.
We got some high end blue tooth speakers that are crap (but cost upward of 4.000€ for 4 pieces). I just asked Google for these things and found them to be Sennheiser TeamConnect Wireless. At least connecting to them with a MBPro when you also want to use AppleTV wireless just isn't a solution.
Never hat so much hassle with setting up conferencing. Give me a good landline for voice and a camera/Tv setup for image.
My experience with them is that they are not that great - you need to be wary of being close to them and speaking in their direction or they'll have trouble picking up your voice.
I didn't have problems with the Jabra Speak, except that it shipped with bad USB firmware and required an update (using a Windows machine). The Logitech has absolutely excellent microphone/speaker separation and echo-cancellation.
Zoom.us is GREAT! Video and audio quality are great, hiccups are rare, the screen sharing features are good, and it integrates easily into our physical offices with a decent iPad app. (I've tried hangouts, hipchat video, appear.in, and a few others, but Zoom is much better.)
As a remote employee, the Owl makes it much easier to be a part of a discussion around a table where most of the meeting participants are in a room at HQ, and a few of us are remote. (I know some of the employees, so I'm biased, but I like to think I would love the Owl even if I didn't know some of the team.)
Thanks for mentioning this camera; it's a huge step up from the system that my company has (hardwired) in conference rooms, and I'll look into purchasing one to trial.
I have no real good recommendation (so I am thankful for all ideas in this thread), but I would not recommend Hangouts and Slack.
We use both in the company I work for and it is a pain in the ass to use. and the image quality isn't really that great.
But both are at least usable.
More important is imho that people know how to use the tools. Give people room to interrupt/ask questions. Make breaks in between your thought units a little bit longer. Because you won't have non-visual signals that someone wants to ask a question. And on the other hand: Give people the chance to bring their thoughts to an end. Don't interrupt premature.
Be more considerate and kind. Go out of your way to compensate for the non-visual signals of communications, that regularly help a lot in f2f situations.
At my company we used Jitsi (and also tried with hosting our own instance) and Appear.in. Both worked kinda fine and appear.in has limit to number of people unless you go to pay option - with more people quality would simply drop and we do have 20+ people in company meeting.
We decided to try old school - we hosted our own Mumble and while maybe not nice UI/UX, it works perfectly for 20+ people. Also I recommend as well having good headphones (with integrated mic) to avoid potential echo (jitsi echo can be annoying without headphones).