What’s your favorite web conference service, both as a presenter (host) and participant, on Apple platforms? I’m on these all day so interested to hear others’ experiences.
FWIW, I settled on Zoom. I didn’t notice any difference in reliability for any of the services I’ve tried. The WebEx UI is clean, modern and more intuitive. But on a multi-display macOS system, WebEx will only share the primary display. A deal-breaker from me because I always want to share my secondary display because it has more real estate but I don’t want it to be my primary for lots of reasons. (On Windows WebEx clientyou can pick the display to share. I emailed WebEx support and didn’t get the sense this was changing anytime soon.)
Zoom is great on iOS (even has a CarPlay app) as well and there are lots of other features like the Outlook Web Access plugin for scheduling meetings. (I don’t use any Office app on my Mac except Excel and Word and I avoid those when I can.)
With the latest update Zoom allows you to share just a portion of a display. You can drag various windows in/out of the area being shared. I’ve wanted this forever!
I’m a HUGE fan of Zoom…so much so that I’m planning on going to their Zoomtopia conference in October.
I often work with people and groups in video-conferenced meetings (ranging in size from one to 75+ people) and Zoom consistently works well. I’ve spent a lot of time with other services over the year (including GoToMeeting, Google Hangouts, WebEx, and Fuze Meeting) and I’ve found that Zoom offers the best feature set, value and user experience.
On a side note, it’s worth take a gander at the My Meeting Settings for your Zoom account. There are a lot of innovative feature that can be enabled, including breakout rooms, polling, and closed captions.
Good to hear, @timstringer! I agree there are a lot of really nifty features and integrations in the online account settings.
Would love to hear how the conference goes as well!
If I could get them to prioritize one improvement it would be the UI. It’s very functional, once you learn it. I seem to have walk participants through sharing their screen, accessing chat, etc a lot more than I had to with WebEx (the other Service I have the most experience with). The interface seems to prioritize video which I have turned off for me and participants. Screen share takes a backseat which is the main reason we use it. In addition to not being super intuitive, the UI looks a little dated so a refresh would be nice.
I’d be happy to share feedback from the conference. Last year (which was their first conference) they did a live stream of at least some of the talks. I expect they’ll do the same again this year.
I encourage you to send your UI suggestions to Zoom. I’ve sent them more than a few requests over the years (mainly feature requests) and most of them eventually made there way into Zoom.
Overall I’d say they prioritize video. It’s pretty rare that I have online meeting where people aren’t on video (especially if it’s a one-on-one session). It seems that people are getting more comfortable being on camera…and I find that the video adds more of a human connection.
I’ve only used the desktop version but am a huge fan of Zoom. They’ve been rock solid even when I’ve had groups of 40+ in the room. And the time I needed to record audio using them the sound quality was great. I used to pay for their service but now have access via my university.
I’ve used the free version of Zoom and I loved it. Is there any video conferencing service out there that let’s you pay as you go? I don’t want to pay a monthly fee for having maybe 6 meetings a year.
I spent 5 years having quarterly web conferences with someone whose Windows-based business required WebEx. It was fine for them but some change or update was required on my end in advance of perhaps half of the meetings. I never knew in advance just which browser (if any) WebEx would work with on the day of the meeting or if it would even run anymore on the version of macOS that I was using. Sometimes I had to get out an old machine with a known working configuration. I came to dread those conferences. I, like the original poster, contacted them about at least one of the issues that I had and received a noncommittal answer. The Mac didn’t seem like a priority to them. I’m hoping that’s changed but I’d want to see real evidence of movement before trying it again.
We’ve used GoToMeeting for the last couple of years. It’s been fine from my side (just joining his meetings).