Chapter 2
Getting to Know Zoom’s Suite of Communication Tools
IN THIS CHAPTER
Reviewing Zoom’s different services
Listing the benefits and features of Zoom’s offerings
Understanding the different plans and costs involved in each
Zoom’s tools let small and even enormous groups of people improve how they communicate. What’s more, Zoom’s offerings are flexible, powerful, affordable, and intuitive.
Of course, in order for you and your colleagues to reap the benefits of using Zoom’s services, you must first understand them. Purchasing the wrong product altogether — or the right one but the wrong plan — will frustrate you and cost you time and money.
This chapter provides a high-level overview of each Zoom subscription. I cover the features, costs, and limitations of each core Zoom service.
Zoom’s Core Services
Many people new to Zoom think of it exclusively as a communications or videoconferencing app. That belief is understandable, because Zoom has exploded in popularity. At the same time, though, it is not at all accurate.
As of this writing, Zoom’s suite of videoconferencing tools consists of four core products and services. Two of them will run on just about any contemporary computing device — with or without a webcam — within a matter of minutes. In other words, they require neither special hardware nor elaborate setup.
The ready-to-go tools include
- Zoom Meetings & Chat
- Zoom Video Webinars
Zoom’s two other services are more intricate in nature. In order to work, they require a bit more setup and, in all likelihood, special hardware. That is, you won’t be up and running in a few minutes. Put differently, the following two Zoom services fall into the some-assembly-is-required bucket:
- Zoom Rooms
- Zoom Phone
Regardless of the time and resources needed to get started, all Zoom products share some similarities, including the underlying technology behind them. What’s more, in their own way, each helps the company achieve its lofty mission of “improving the quality and effectiveness of communications forever.”
Put all of Zoom’s services together, and you arrive at Figure 2-1.
An individual or large enterprise need not purchase or subscribe to every Zoom product in Figure 2-1. Each one works quite nicely on its own. To be sure, some organizations have gone all-in on Zoom and gladly subscribe to all of its services. I suspect that the vast majority of Zoom’s customers, however, opt for only a few of them.
FIGURE 2-1: Zoom’s suite of tools.
Ready to Go
This section details the two Zoom offerings that require no special hardware or elaborate setup: Meetings & Chat and Video Webinars. If you’ve purchased your computer, smartphone, or tablet in the last five years, odds are that you’ll be up and running with each of these services within a few minutes.
Zoom Meetings & Chat
Zoom has named its most popular service Meetings & Chat. (The nomenclature on Zoom’s website is a bit inconsistent.) Regardless of its moniker, the product allows users to hold high-definition (HD) audio and video calls and send text messages. As such, Meetings & Chat is ideal for the following types of work-related meetings and interactions:
- Simple one-to-one chat sessions
- Online training sessions
- Company announcements
- Calls to technical support to diagnose user’s issue, especially with screen-sharing
- And many more
If concept of making audio and video calls over the Internet seems old hat to you, trust your instincts. (Chapter 1 covers many of Zoom’s predecessors in this field.) In other words, it’s not that Meetings & Chat does something fundamentally different than its predecessors did; it’s that Meetings & Chat does the same thing much better. Think of it as souped-up version of Skype. As the nearby sidebar “Search before Google” illustrates, Zoom finds itself in illustrious company in this regard.
Main features and benefits
Meetings & Chat is a robust offering that provides its users with an arsenal of potent bells and whistles.
BUILT-IN COLLABORATION TOOLS
Many tools let users share their screens with others. Meetings & Chat takes this a step further. Multiple participants can concurrently share their screens, co-annotate their screens, and more. Ultimately, all these features provide for more interactive meetings.
DEVICE AGNOSTICISM
In the past, mainstream videoconferencing tools tended to work well only on certain types of computers running specific operating systems.
Not Zoom.
Meetings & Chat lets you start and join meetings and collaborate across any device.
That’s not to say, though, that you can perform every task on every type of device.
SCHEDULING MADE EASY
Meetings & Chat integrates with popular calendar applications, such as Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, and iCal. As a result, you won’t have to waste time synchronizing multiple applications. Third-party apps, covered in Chapter 7, make this integration even tighter.
HOLDING SECURE MEETINGS
No application is entirely safe from prying eyes, but Zoom has invested a great deal of resources in making Meetings & Chat as bulletproof as possible. To this end, the product
- Encrypts all meetings
- Offers role-based user security
- Lets users protect their meetings with passwords
- Allows hosts to create waiting rooms for participants
- Lets users place attendees on hold
Chapter 9 has plenty more to say about security and privacy.
RECORDING, STORING, AND TRANSCRIBING MEETINGS
Many previous videoconferencing tools required a third-party plugin or app to record meetings. Not Meetings & Chat. Depending on your plan, Zoom lets you
- Record and save your meetings locally or to the cloud
- Download searchable transcripts that improve in quality all the time
SENDING MESSAGES AND FILES
Sometimes you might not be in the mood for a video call. Maybe you haven’t put your face on yet or your house is a mess.
No bother.
As the second half of its name suggests, Meetings & Chat lets you communicate via text. That is, you can chat with groups of people just like you would with WhatsApp, Slack, and many more apps. You can search that history and upload files for others to view. Even better, Zoom maintains this archive for a decade.
Oh, and if you want to move your conversation from text to voice, that’s easy to do as well.
Plans and costs
For Meetings, Zoom offers one free Meetings & Chat plan and three paid ones.
BASIC
Zoom’s Basic plan for Meetings & Chat offers a great deal of functionality at zero cost. No, you can’t take advantage of every Zoom bell and whistle. Still, the starter plan lets you do quite a bit. Here are some highlights:
- Host meetings with up to 100 participants for a maximum of 40 minutes each. (Note that Zoom has waived this limit for teachers struggling to hold remote classes with their students in the wake of COVID-19.)
- Host an unlimited number of meetings
- Chat with groups and send files
- Split your meeting into separate breakout rooms
- Brainstorm and take notes with a virtual whiteboard
- Share single or multiple screens with meeting attendees
- Call into a meeting via a phone
I cover more of these features in Chapter 4.
When it comes to upgrading Meetings & Chat, as of this writing, Zoom offers the following paid plans:
- Pro
- Business
- Enterprise
- Enterprise Plus
- Education
Throughout the text, I collectively refer to these options as premium plans.
Date before you get married. As with any software plan or subscription, kick the tires first before making a long-term commitment.
PRO
Zoom’s first step up from the Basic plan is its Pro plan. The latter delivers all the options of the Basic plan plus a bunch more. Here are some of its highlights:
- Hold meetings for up to 24 hours.
- Run a variety of reports on member usage.
- Delegate your meetings. You can let someone else set up your meetings for you. (Note that your delegate also needs to subscribe to a Pro plan or above.)
- Create and distribute a personal meeting ID (PMI).
- Store up to a ridiculous one gigabyte (GB) of files in the cloud.
- Grant different rights to different people (a.k.a. user management).
- Control what other people in your organization can do. For example, you can enable and disable the others’ ability to record calls, encryption, chat, and notifications.
For the Pro plan, Zoom charges $14.99 (USD) per month per host when billed monthly or $149.90 (USD) when billed annually.
BUSINESS
Zoom’s next offering is its Business plan. This plan delivers all the options of the Pro plan plus a bunch more. Highlights here include
- Host meetings with up to 300 participants.
- Receive dedicated phone support.
- Access the Zoom Dashboard. Administrators on the account can view information ranging from overall usage to live in-meeting data.
- Create a vanity web address. Say that I ran a record store called Phil’s Records. I could direct people to philsrecords.zoom.us.
- Automatically add users to your account via email-address domains.
- Automatically generate call transcripts.
For the Business plan, Zoom charges $19.99 (USD) per month when billed monthly or $166.58 (USD) when billed annually.
ENTERPRISE
Zoom’s next Meetings offering delivers all the options of the Business plan plus the following:
- Host meetings and webinars with up to 500 participants.
- Receive unlimited file storage.
- Work with a dedicated customer-success manager.
- Talk to Zoom execs about its product roadmap and future direction.
- Receive discounts on other Zoom products.
The Enterprise plan costs $19.99 (USD) per month per host when billed monthly. What’s more, an organization needs to commit to a minimum of 50 hosts or software licenses. For a proper quote, you’ll have to contact Zoom’s sales staff. All else being equal, more licenses translates into a bigger bill — although I would expect the per-license fee to drop. (I have learned a few things about enterprise software in my years.)
ENTERPRISE PLUS
Zoom’s most expensive and robust Meetings offering delivers all the options of the Enterprise plan at a per-user discount. It allows you to host meetings and webinars with up to 1,000 participants.
The Enterprise Plus plan requires
- A minimum of 2,500 licenses
- A two-year minimum commitment
To receive a proper quote for this plan, you’ll have to contact Zoom.
Zoom also offers specialized plans for organizations that must abide by specific legislation:
- Zoom for Education: For more information, see
bit.ly/zfd-ed. - Zoom for Telehealth: For more information, see
bit.ly/zfd-th.
In both cases, you’ll have to contact a Zoom sales rep to receive a proper quote.
Add-ons
Zoom realizes that one size does not fit all. To this end, it allows its customers to significantly customize their individual plans. Specific add-ons to its Meetings subscription include the following:
- Webinars: I cover this topic in both the next section and in Chapter 8.
- Zoom Rooms: See the section “Zoom Rooms,” later in this chapter, for a brief introduction. Chapter 10 devotes much more space to it.
- Large meetings: This feature allows users to attend Zoom meetings with 500 or 1,000 participants, depending on the customer’s license. Owners or admins of Pro accounts can simply can add this feature to the monthly or annual tab.
- Audio conferencing options: Perhaps you want to make it easy for your employees, customers, and prospects to talk to you — especially the international ones. To these ends, Zoom allows you to pay for toll-free numbers, fee-based toll numbers, and dedicated dial-in numbers.
- Cloud recording: If your storage needs exceed those that Zoom offers under your current plan, then you can upgrade as needed. That is, you don’t need to purchase a more expensive plan solely because you need to upgrade a single feature.
Zoom Video Webinars
Zoom’s offering here lets even the least tech-savvy person hold full-featured, intuitive, and engaging webinars. Webinar hosts can easily manage and administer the meetings thanks to Zoom’s useful controls. As for size, you won’t be lacking. As of this writing, up to 100 people can actively participate and 10,000 people can attend a single webinar.
Main features and benefits
Here are some of the most powerful and useful features of Zoom Webinars.
- Recording: Zoom lets users easily and automatically record events for later publishing and viewing.
- Broadcasting to popular third-party sites: Unless you live in a bubble, you’re probably aware that untold millions of people view live-streamed videos on Facebook Live and YouTube Live every day. Fortunately, Zoom lets webinar hosts concurrently broadcast their events to those sites. Doing so often gooses user interest and engagement.
- Reporting: Say that your organization sells widgets. To this end, it wants to use Zoom Webinars as a sales tool. Zoom lets users easily run reports on webinar registrants, attendees, polls, attendee engagement, and more. This information helps individuals qualify leads for their companies.
- Integrating with other enterprise systems: Many organizations use webinars for lead-generation purposes. That is, by demonstrating the product or service, they hope to convert interested prospects into paying customers. To this extent, they need to easily integrate webinar-attendee data with popular marketing and customer-relationship management (CRM) applications, such as Marketo and Salesforce. Zoom makes this a breeze.
- Ensuring security: Zoom safeguards all attendee log-in and webinar session data. As of this writing, version 5.1.1 of Meetings & Chat provides 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). (Chapter 9 goes far deeper into this subject.)
Plans and costs
Zoom’s plans are remarkably flexible: You don’t need to pay for licenses that you don’t need. (Trust me: Years ago, companies often wasted bundles on unused software seats.)
Unfortunately, the company’s flexibility admittedly makes understanding the pricing for Zoom Video Webinars a tad confusing in the following regard: Zoom does not offer its webinars subscription on a standalone basis. (Zoom Rooms — discussed in the next section — is the only exception to this rule.)
To subscribe to the webinar plan, you’ll first need to sign up for one of the premium Meetings & Chat plans listed in Table 2-1. In this sense, webinars represent an add-on to the core Meetings & Chat subscription. What’s more, Zoom charges by the host. In this case, a host is a webinar emcee. More hosts means a larger monthly and annual tab. Ditto for increasing the cap on webinar participants.
Table 2-1 displays the Zoom Video Webinar offerings as well as their costs as of this writing.
TABLE 2-1 Zoom Webinar Add-On Pricing Information
|
Plan Name |
Host Minimum |
Monthly Cost (USD) per Host |
Annual Cost (USD) per Host |
|
Pro |
1 |
$40 |
$400 |
|
Business |
10 |
$199.90 |
$1,999 |
|
Education |
20 |
n/a |
$1,800 |
|
Zoom Rooms |
1 |
$40 |
$400 |
Note that Zoom does not provide add-on pricing for webinars for its Enterprise and Enterprise Plus offering. In this way, webinars resemble the Meetings & Chat product. You’ll have to contact Zoom’s sales folks and negotiate a deal.
Chapter 8 covers Zoom Video Webinars in far more detail.
Some Assembly Required
This section details Zoom’s two enterprise-grade services: Zoom Rooms and Zoom Phone. Unlike the subscriptions in the previous section, the ones in this section may involve purchasing special hardware and some effort configuring it. Put differently, these tools require more than just an individual device, such as a MacBook Air, Microsoft Surface Pro 7, or a contemporary smartphone.
Note that your organization may not need to shell out beaucoup bucks to take advantage of Zoom’s offerings in this section. Your employer’s IT folks may be able to configure its existing video displays, speakers, and the like.
Zoom’s hardware-intensive services cannot perform miracles. Say that your company is located in an area with notoriously weak and spotty Internet connectivity. In this case, it’s imperative to temper your performance expectations.
Zoom Rooms
Meetings & Chat and Video Webinars allow you to hold robust video-based meetings. Say that you’re in Timbuktu, your boss Pete is in Montreal, and your client Ian is in Colombia. The three of you can meet online, but you won’t feel as if you’re in the same room.
But what if you and Pete are in the same physical location? Yep, I’m talking about an actual, brick-and-mortar room. What if you wanted to enter a souped-up conference room and share it with Mark in London, Steve H. in Gaza, and Steve R. in Warsaw, Poland? (These are the names of the insanely talented members of Marillion, one of my very favorite bands, but I digress.) Collectively, you want to do more than host a simple teleconference from your homes or hotel rooms with basic screen-sharing and video feeds.
And what if employees at your firm regularly needed to conduct these types of high-end meetings from the same physical locations? That is, you want to fit a bunch of conference rooms with affordable hardware and software that really make an impression with your colleagues and prospects. Alternatively, what if your company routinely conducts remote training classes with new hires? In these cases, Meetings & Chat may not be sufficient for your needs.
Welcome to Zoom Rooms, a way of taking Meetings & Chat up a notch.
Main features and benefits
Zoom Rooms transforms normal conference rooms into something more powerful, interactive, and collaborative. I like to think of Zoom Rooms as Meetings & Chat on steroids. That is, with Zoom Rooms, you can do many of the same things as Meetings & Chat, but the former is a far more robust product.
RECORDING YOUR MEETINGS
Just like with Meetings & Chat, Zoom Rooms lets users easily record what takes place in your company’s conference and training rooms and with its virtual guests.
MAKING MAINTENANCE EASY
Many IT departments and employees struggle to maintain their companies’ legacy audio/visual systems. Compared to many of its predecessors, Zoom Rooms requires very little software and hardware maintenance.
WHITEBOARDING AND ANNOTATING
Do you often brainstorm with others during meetings? Do you consider yourself a visual learner or thinker? Say that you’re trying to nail that new product launch or find the best way to solve a vexing technical problem. Annotating a computer screen just doesn’t cut it for you. You need something more.
Zoom Rooms allows for far more interactive whiteboarding than Meetings & Chat does. Meeting participates can
- Concurrently annotate across all devices and Zoom Rooms without everyone sharing the same virtual dry erase marker
- Concurrently use up to 12 whiteboards
- Can save and distribute their collaborative whiteboarding sessions
WIRELESSLY SHARING CONTENT
Users can easily and concurrently share multiple desktops in the room. Meeting attendees and hosts can take advantage of a variety of simple wireless sharing options.
INTEGRATING WITH EXISTING A/V SYSTEMS
Say that your employer already installed an expensive audio/visual (A/V) system in its conference rooms. Depending on its current configuration, it may well be able to integrate those devices with Zoom Rooms. That is, your company may not need to trash its current setup.
MAKING SCHEDULING EASY
To reserve a room for a given time and date, employees can simply tap on a physical screen outside of a Zoom Room. From there, they can also view the scheduled meetings for that room. (Yes, they can do the same through Zoom software no matter where they are.)
GUARANTEEING SYSTEM UPTIME
The company guarantees its Zoom Room customers system uptime of 99.99 percent. I did the math. This provision means that, in a given year, Zoom Rooms will go offline for a maximum of about nine hours.
To be fair, the 99.99 number is certainly impressive, but not unique. That level has been fairly common in the tech world for years. For example, cloud-computing juggernauts Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google all guarantee similar uptime percentages in the end-user license agreements (EULAs). Ditto for the collaboration tool Slack.
Plans and costs
Subscribing to Zoom Rooms does not require the purchase of another Zoom product. That is, it’s a standalone solution, although you can certainly add on to it.
Zoom Rooms costs $49 (USD) per month per room. Organizations that want so save a few bucks can opt for the annual plan: $499 per month per room.
Note that there’s no practical limit to the number of meeting participants under this plan. If you can cram 2,112 in a room for a single training session, have at it. Zoom won’t be monitoring your meetings. (Chapter 9 covers security and privacy in far more detail.)
Supercharging Zoom Rooms
Depending on your organization’s needs and its current videoconferencing hardware, it may want to consider two complementary products:
- Zoom Conference Room Connectors
- Zoom Rooms for Touch
Both work in conjunction with Zoom Rooms.
ZOOM CONFERENCE ROOM CONNECTORS
Say that you work at Gray Matter Technologies (GMT). Five years ago, it purchased and deployed expensive telecommunications equipment. I’m talking about regular, speaker, and even video-enabled phones. Also assume that GMT contracted Cisco, Polycom, Lifesize, or another popular vendor. The implementation went fairly smoothly.
Today, those devices still function, but users wish that they could do more with them. Depending on their age, you find them a bit long in the tooth. The software isn’t very intuitive and employees sometimes employees complain about audio call quality Video feeds are sometimes choppy. Finally, you cannot easily record conference calls, much less store them.
But your A/V system still technically works.
You try making the case to GMT’s chief technology officer (CTO), Elliot. He agrees with you, but he simply cannot justify the cost of replacing all of its videoconferencing hardware.
What to do?
Thanks to Conference Room Connectors, GMT can have its cake and eat it, too.
Companies can purchase Zoom Conference Room Connectors — devices that let their employees make Zoom video calls using their organization’s existing conference-room hardware. Put differently, this fresh coat of paint allows employees to take advantage of Zoom’s intuitive user interface (UI) while moving their existing, on-premises videoconferencing systems to the cloud.
If you want to know more about the core technologies behind Zoom competitors, see Chapter 1.
ZOOM ROOMS FOR TOUCH
I’ll bet that you’ve become accustomed to touchscreens over the past 12 years. In fact, you may chuckle when you see someone with a BlackBerry or an old-school flip phone. Odds are, though, that you don’t touch your television or large computer monitor.
Zoom Rooms for Touch takes the core Zoom Room product to the next level. It turns a Zoom Room into an app the size of a television. Specific features include being able to do the following:
- Instantly collaborate with others and share content over remarkably fluid video.
- Brainstorm with your entire team on a massive digital video screen.
- Easily share your screen and whiteboard with meeting participants.
Chapter 10 provides more information on Zoom Rooms, the hardware required to run them, and their add-ons.
Zoom Phone
Got a landline?
Fifteen years ago, you almost certainly did.
Data provider Statista reports that, in 2004, you could find a landline in nearly 93 percent of U.S. households. As of 2018, that number had declined to 41.7 percent. (See the chart yourself at bit.ly/2004-zoom.) Brass tacks: At home, hundreds of millions across the globe have dropped their landlines altogether.
At work, however, it may well be a different story. Traditional desk-based phones haven’t gone the way of the Dodo just yet. After all, do you want to give your personal cellphone number to every Tom, Dick, and Harry? I’m talking about customers, colleagues, vendors, and partners. Plus, what about call centers? Millions of businesses still need to provide traditional desks and company-owned phones to their employees. Many organizations have discovered their answer in the form of Zoom Phone.
Main features and benefits
Zoom’s final offering as of this writing is Zoom Phone — a high-tech version of a traditional business phone system. Its slick software and technical underpinnings (again, cloud computing) make it a vast improvement of early VoIP efforts.
- Centralized management: Administrators can quickly provision and manage users. Zoom Phone dashboards allow administrators to easily view key information on the calls that employees are making. What’s more, the visualizations allow for quick identification of call performance. As a result, the company can quickly identify any network-related quality issues before they mushroom.
- Security and reliability: The company has taken great pains to ensure that users’ Zoom Phone calls are both secure and clear.
- Traditional phone features: You may not leave voicemails for your friends and family, but the feature remains important in many corporate settings. Ditto for call recording. Zoom Phone offers both of these essential features.
- Call routing: Zoom Phone allows organizations to quickly and intelligently route queued calls to available agents and assistants. Without this essential functionality, modern day call centers would cease to exist.
Plans and costs
Like Video Webinars, Zoom Phone is an add-on to its core Meetings & Chat plan. Table 2-2 displays the available types of Zoom Phone plans and their costs.
Chapter 11 covers Zoom Phone in far more depth.
TABLE 2-2 Zoom Phone Options
|
Plan |
Locations |
Cost (USD) |
|
Unlimited Calling |
U.S. and Canada |
$15 per month per license |
|
Metered Calling (ideal for infrequently used phones) |
U.S. and Canada |
$10 per month per license |
|
Additional Phone Numbers |
U.S. and Canada |
$5 per month per number |
|
Toll-Free Phone Numbers |
U.S. and Canada |
$5 per month per number |
|
Metered calling options for calls placed outside of your designated calling plan |
All |
Variable |