hello everybody i'm Scott Carey i'm the group editor for
B2B in the UK. i'm joined today by staff writer
Charlotte Trueman. Charlotte you must be an extremely relieved person this week
your mammoth comparison of the five most popular
video conferencing tools finally went up on computer world this week
um tell us a little bit about this project
um and most importantly how did you decide to
which tools to start comparing and and how to actually start benchmarking them
against one another yeah so it was about five weeks in the
making this project so it feels so strange to no longer be
um working on it but i'm glad it's out there now um
basically what we wanted to do is kind of with everything that's going on at
the moment we knew that there's gonna be a massive uptake in people using
video conferencing software or they work from home
and we thought it would be a good idea to kind of review some of the most
popular platforms out there to give people that don't use video conferencing
um a lot normally um a kind of overview of what is available and what
might work best for their organization um so we consulted
a gartner magic quadrant to see kind of what was leading um in that
market at the moment and we also decided to look at google
and microsoft's offering because um at idg um they're platforms that we both
already use
yeah and i think it's important to be clear that we're talking about kind of
enterprise grade video conferencing we're not uh comparing
your kind of um uh house parties and your whatsapp videos
and stuff like that um good to hear that you know the the
garden magic quadrant has its uses for us
journalists we can often be quite sniffy about them um
who were the five that kind of came out of that process that you were gonna
start comparing and i understand that in terms of the logic of that comparison
you you decided to split usability and security which we'll
we'll get into a little bit more because obviously that security aspect
especially with zoom in the in the press recently has been quite prevalent
so like i said we wanted we knew from the outside we were gonna
have a look at google me and microsoft teams because
um as i already explained there both platforms that we use already internally
at idg um but the other three that we opted to
go for was zoom cisco webex and logbians go to
meeting great and from that usability
perspective which one of those came out on top or were you most impressed by uh
from just a pure kind of ease of use feature set
perspective um so it has to be said um of all the five platforms that we
tested we were actually um really happily surprised um about the
quality of the audio in the video on every platform there wasn't
one where um people's connections were so bad or the platform was so bad that
it actually impacted our overall ability to have a
meeting so that was a really good find um purely from a usability point of view
um zoom just has the most um in meeting
features um which is really great it has kind of
your standard like um in-call chat features it also has a
whiteboarding and you can do things like raise your hand on your screen if you
want to or put a little emoji up in your corner
and kind of express how you're feeling about the call i guess um so that was
really great there was lots to um play around with there um personally as
well although it has fewer in meeting
features i quite liked google me because of the simplicity
of it it kind of does exactly what it says on the tin
you dial into a call and then you have a call or you can send a message and
that's kind of it but um i quite liked that
from that perspective yeah i guess we know that zoom have
spent so much time and investment in making it a really simple tool to use
which is kind of the reason why they've burst
into popularity during this pandemic and i'm glad to hear what you said about
google me because personally you know we're g
suite uh company and i i personally find it quite
quite a good tool for for what you need it for um
that's the positives what about the negatives what about the tools that
didn't quite stand up to the competition as well
yeah um so it's i guess it's just important to mention that obviously this
is a review and all the opinions in it are
subjective so what i personally like or what our team
personally likes in a um video conferencing platform might not be
the same as what um your team is looking for so although we
tried to kind of give a fair assessment obviously you
need to kind of try these things out for yourself
um personally we weren't that keen on microsoft teams
um just because um it's they are they are making a change this but currently
you can only see four people at a time on the screen
which is if you're having a larger meeting that's obviously
not great it's kind of you want to be able to see everyone and interact with
everyone um so we were happy to hear from
microsoft that that is um they are going to up that number to i think it's nine
initially and then 16 in the future um yeah that was kind of our least
favorite um yeah i think you were quite surprised
by that yeah yeah and you were quite surprised by
that right i mean we've definitely heard anecdotally some people are quite big
fans of teams yeah um so one of my good friends they
um her um at her work now they're working from home they actually have
microsoft teams running all day in the background because they can kind of just
chat and it makes it feel like it's more like an office
um but again again like we're a google um g suite organization and we
like google me they're a microsoft an office 365 365
organization and they happen to like microsoft teams so like i
said a lot of these things are a bit subjective that is wild to me i
would not want to have the video conferencing just running in
the background at all times i'm glad that we do not do that in our
team um we would be remiss to not talk about
some of the security aspects of this conversation
um it's obviously important to note that we are
not security um reporters you know we don't
uh we can't get into the nitty-gritty of it but there's certainly aspects of of
these tools that you you did look at especially from maybe a basic encryption
point of view and just that that real security hygiene aspect um we
know that the zoom some of the aspects of zoom security has
been put in the spotlight since the pandemic
uh how did you go on security and what did you find
yeah so again i think it's important to note when you're talking about video
conferencing platforms um people talk a lot about end-to-end encryption but
actually if you do want end-to-end encryption on
a video conferencing um platform it actually limits some of
your features what you can do which is a big reason i think why a lot
of platforms don't actually offer it because it would diminish
um kind of the quality of the call i guess of the platforms we tested
cisco webex is the only one that does offer end-to-end encryption
um but you have to ask for that to be turned on because of the fact that it
will then limit some of what you can do on the
call um but it's available across all their um paid platforms so it
doesn't matter even if you have the cheapest platform the most expensive one
you can request that end-to-end encryption gets turned on
okay and i think it's important to note uh the what we're talking about with
end-to-end encryption right it's it's that
aspect of it where um the communication is is encrypted at either end so that
no one including cisco can access the content of that call right
yeah precisely perfect um so yeah so it looks like you know if you
want that if you want that then webex is your only option from these five that we
tested i'm sure there's some uber secure options out there for
for certain organizations but in terms of the really kind of popular ones
um that's that's an important differentiator for them
great okay so uh in terms of the security
aspects of some of the other popular tools um we've mentioned zoom a few
times it's obviously wildly popular uh what have they done to maybe uh calm
some of the concerns that organizations have from a
security perspective there i know that they've
they've made quite a concerted effort to solve some of those problems straight
away yeah so zoom seemed to have really taken
on board a lot of um kind of the feedback they received or a
lot of the criticism i should say they received about their security
issues and um i think it was the beginning of april
their ceo announced that they were going to
stop as a company they were going to stop developing new features and
actually just entirely focus on um fixing some of
those security issues that had come up um so a lot of the things they've done
they've kind of been like little changes so they've removed like
the meeting id from kind of the barrier of the screen
so you can't accidentally if you if like our prime minister
you post a screenshot of your zoom meeting no one now will be able to see
your meeting id um they've kind of strengthened password
complexity and requirements um and and they've kind
of just added more in meeting features as well
so hosts can now report people in the meeting and there's
just a lot more in meeting security options as well to try and just make it
that much more secure awesome and last question in terms of
you know you you've been playing with these platforms now for five weeks
were there any specific any cool features that you've kind of found that
you really liked from one of the platforms that people might
not be familiar with i know that there's now some cool in in
app in video transcription services that are being added and stuff like that was
there anything that kind of popped uh to the front of your mind from that
perspective yeah so that's one thing that um has to
be said about microsoft teams actually um their in-meeting transcription
service was really really good and very accurate and we were all really
impressed by the quality of it um google me also offered an in-call
transcription service which again was very accurate we were all
i'm highly impressed with that um zoom now if you have a zoom pro account and
also an otter.ai paid account you can now link the two
together and get real time in meeting transcription as
well so that's a really cool feature especially
if you're kind of hosting a meeting or you don't have time necessarily to take
notes while you're trying to have a conversation that's like a really good
um tool to have the whiteboarding feature as well
um also really great um kind of bit of fun as well maybe if you want to
kind of take a more informal approach to these things
um so if you start digging down into a lot of these platforms there are some
nice little features that kind of will differentiate them
yeah i spend a lot of time talking to developers and developer leads
in my day job and a lot of them actually rely on whiteboards quite a lot to kind
of sketch out problems um if they've got an engineering problem
that they want to solve they'll they'll whiteboard it out so they they
rely on those features quite a lot um a lot of them complain about them
because you know it's not a whiteboard in the office and they can't
kind of do it that way but i think they're they're quite important features
to have um great thank you so if someone wants
to go off and read uh your you know your your big
review of all these video conferencing solutions
where could they find that work yeah so the full review is
on computerworld.com now and that's where
um everything that i write in the future about video conferencing
um will be published as well awesome thanks charlotte
uh thanks everyone for joining us stay safe see you soon bye