How to Choose the Best Video Meeting Software

In the new world of remote work and diverse and hybrid workforces, collaboration tools like video meeting software are increasingly crucial to facilitating communication between your employees and clients. Furthermore, the best meeting recording software can help you to increase users' engagement and productivity levels.

Choosing the best meeting recording software for your business depends on factors like how many people participate in calls, how often you plan to hold video conferences and whether you'll need to integrate other applications.

What are the benefits of video communication software?

This expanding market has meeting tools for businesses of all sizes and budgets. The best meeting software provides critical benefits, including:  

• Improved collaboration: Video conferencing solutions offer levels of collaboration that traditional solutions can't compete with. For example, participants can see fellow callers' facial expressions and physical gestures, share files and show their screens. Participants can also react to topics using emojis, enabling you to assess employee opinion and satisfaction quickly.
• Remote work flexibility: Employees are increasingly comfortable holding video meetings to engage with their colleagues, customers, friends and family. Video communication software enables them to hold secure, private video calls whenever and wherever they need to work from, be it their office desk, living room, a coffee shop, an airport or their local park.
• Increased scalability: Leading video meeting solutions enable you to hold one-to-one catchups and company-wide broadcasts that thousands of employees can join from remote locations.
• Call recording capabilities: Video meeting software lets you record calls for anyone to watch after the meeting. This is ideal for large global businesses as people don't need to worry about joining a call late at night; they can simply watch the recording at a more suitable time.
• Chat functions: You've likely been on calls or in meetings that get held up by irrelevant or unnecessary questions. With video communication tools, queries can be typed in chat logs to ensure speakers only address relevant questions or topics and deal with other issues without breaking the flow of the speakers.
• Secure collaboration: Video conferencing solutions use built-in security to keep all video meetings private and secure participant details and any shared information. This enables you to secure the call itself, recordings of the session, call translations and any chat messages or documents shared in the conference.

How to choose the best video meeting software?

With these benefits in mind, choosing which video communication software is the best for your business will rely on many factors. Making this decision will depend on issues such as:

• Interoperability: Purchasing a piece of software only to discover it's incompatible with your existing software will hinder technology integrations, employee adoption and may even pose a potential security risk. The meeting tools you deploy needs to be interoperable and beneficial to your users' daily work activity.
• Ease of use: The usability of video communication software is a crucial factor in whether employees will adopt it. Unused and under-utilized software is a significant cost drain on businesses, so it's vital to ensure meeting recording software is useful to employees and easy for them to pick up and use immediately. Don't forget to plan a roadmap for training end users and fostering true adoption.
• Collaboration needs: New video meeting software helps your employees to enjoy greater interaction with colleagues and customers. They can see how engaged people are in the conversation, build stronger relationships with clients and hold activities like whiteboard sessions without being in the same room. It also offers valuable features like breakout rooms, chat options and participant muting.
• Usage requirements and scalability: Video meeting software solutions designed for conferences with thousands of people typically cost more than those that host smaller sessions. Deploying the wrong software can be costly or make you look unprofessional and underprepared. Consider how many people are likely to use your solution and the size of conferences they'll be hosting.
• Advanced capabilities: Video communication software solutions provide additional features like automatic transcriptions of a call, which is ideal for keeping notes of what's been discussed and sharing updates with people who couldn't attend. Other services enable translation options, which is perfect for attendees from various countries.
• Security levels: Selecting a secure video conferencing solution is vital to ensuring data security, compliance and control. So, you need to consider how secure the platform itself is, whether it offers additional security features and how it will respond to a potential threat.

What is the most popular video meeting software?

To select the best meeting software for your business, you need to know the technologies available in the marketplace and how they work together. It's also important to keep an eye on new products coming onto the market and feature sets that will be compatible with your existing setup.  

The most popular video meeting software currently available includes:  

• Cisco Webex provides a range of secure solutions for all video meeting requirements. Webex Meetings is its most widely adopted service, combining intuitive video conferences that are easy to schedule and join with cutting-edge security. Other options include the Webex app, which enables users to securely message, meet and call on the go, and Webex Calling, which provides cloud-based advanced voice capabilities. Cisco also provides Meeting Server, an on-premises solution that provides audio, video and web conferencing capabilities, and enables you to easily manage your services through Control Hub.
• Microsoft Teams enables employees to engage through video calls, chat and file-sharing at any time. All documents, chat messages, meeting notes, photos and videos are stored in one place, making it easier for people to work together. It also integrates with other Microsoft apps, such as Excel, Word and PowerPoint, so users can collaborate in real-time without jumping between services.
• Zoom is a video conferencing solution that enables employees to collaborate and communicate wherever they are. Zoom provides options for small businesses, school districts, enterprises and individuals.
• GoToMeeting is a virtual meeting platform that ensures users can work anywhere on any device. It provides secure online meetings with industry-leading audio and video quality.
• Google Meet, Google's video meeting software, makes a solution built for secure business interactions freely available to everyone.
• Horizon Workrooms is a relatively new solution from Meta, enabling people to interact in virtual rooms regardless of where they're located. The solution works via the web or through virtual reality to increase collaboration between teams.

How can World Wide Technology help with video meeting software?

WWT is an independent, certified partner that's perfectly positioned to recommend the video communication software best suited to your organization's specific needs. We recommend, license and install popular tools like Cisco Webex, Microsoft Teams and Zoom to help you enjoy frictionless, high-quality call experiences and simplify meeting admin.

WWT provides strategy roadmaps that help you streamline the number of video meeting software solutions your organization supports. WWT can also deploy resources to work with your IT staff to install and configure your video meeting software and integrations, guaranteeing your chosen solution will integrate with other apps and the digital workspace. Our Advanced Technology Center (ATC) demonstrates how solutions will integrate and interoperate within your organization before you purchase them. Furthermore, our adoption services go beyond training employees to help you maximize the value of digital workspace technologies.

Discover how WWT can help your organization reap the benefits of video communication software by developing a robust collaboration and productivity strategy.