Whether you are a global corporation or a small business, ensuring remote working colleagues can keep in touch is suddenly more important than ever. John Leonard, research director at our sister title Computing, looks at the best video-enabled collaboration tools that could help bridge the communications gap.
Atos Unify Circuit
Unify is Atos SE's communications and collaboration brand, specialised in developing and deploying unified communications, network infrastructure & security and managed/professional services for small and large businesses.
Circuit is an app the provides voice, video, screen share, chat and file sharing.
A basic implementation of Circuit is available for free, with 1GB storage. It supports 100 users and up to three users per conference call. The Team package is designed to meet the needs of small groups. It offers 5GB of storage and up to six users per conference call, with an unlimited number of users. It also features SLA support and costs £2.95 per user per month. Professional and Enterprise packages are available for more complex organisations.
Atos Unify also provides OpenScape Cloud, a Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) offering. It is based on Circuit and voice communication platform OpenScape Voice.
Recently the company announced it would be using RingCentral as its preferred provider of UCaaS solutions. The two companies will introduce a co-branded UCaaS solution as part of the Atos Digital Workplace offering.
Delta users found the product to be fully featured and easy to use, although reliability could be a problem especially with the mobile apps, and support was patchy due to it being outsourced to third-parties.
Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Rainbow
Rainbow is Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise's cloud-based Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) solution.
It is best suited to large organisations looking to make the most of existing assets such as PBXs and provides a single control pane across various services. It is designed for fast integration with PBX solutions workstream collaboration and CPaaS.
Rainbow's main features include contact management, presence, chat, audio/video call and screen and filesharing. It uses WebRTC to ensure high-quality audio and video streams in the browser. Rainbow uses NLP to offer transcription services, intelligent routing, and speech and text analysis.
Delta respondents said ALE solutions are easy to set up and scale and that support is good. On the downside, others felt the company was still hidebound by its PBX past and was not innovating quickly enough.
Rainbow is also an open platform-as-a-service offering, with a set of APIs enabling users to integrate the solution's collaboration tools into their existing in-house applications and business processes.
There is a limited free tier. Pricing for more advanced options is available on request.
Delta
Delta is Professional Adviser's sister title Computing's technology market intelligence services that distills the opinions and experience of thousands of IT leaders. They have put together a special three month trial for access to all research to help with business continuity at this challenging time. For the price of a cup of coffee per team member day. Conditions apply. Click here to request a demo.
3CX WebMeeting
3CX is an open-platform software VoIP phone system that works with IP phones and SIP trunks both on-premise or in the cloud. 3CX WebMeeting is a clientless web conferencing and collaboration solution which uses WebRTC to offer video calls. The usual file and screen sharing features are also supported.
It's available as a small Linux appliance for $200, as a free Windows VM or as a hosted cloud-based PBX service.
The standard version of 3CX is free and allows web conferences for up to 25 participants. Additional features including O365 and CRM integration and call recording are available in Enterprise which costs from $1.31 per user per month.
Delta users appreciated 3CX's clear pricing and low costs, although documentation and particularly training could be improved.
To help people now working from home, 3CX says it will be "offering the Standard edition of its software to all organisations completely free of charge for 3 years".
Zoho Meeting
Indian software giant Zoho provides software for many SME business needs, and audio/video meetings are no different. Zoho Meeting allows users to hold online meetings with real-time audio, video, meeting recording and screen sharing, in-session chat and moderator controls. It offers integrations with Zoho CRM, Projects, Calendar and other tools. All transmissions take place through SSL/128-bit AES encryption protocols.
There is a 14-day free trial, after which Meeting costs £6.30 per host per month, which accommodates up to 100 participants and includes storage for 10 recordings. There's also a limited free plan for up to three participants.
Zoho's Small Business Emergency Subscription Assistance Programme (ESAP) offers 20,000 qualified paying customers with 25 employees or less to use every application currently in use for free for up to three months.
Google Hangouts Meet
Google Hangouts Meet is a web-based video conferencing service and is fully integrated with G Suite. Users can join Hangouts Meet meetings using third-party systems, such as Skype, or meeting systems based on SIP and H.323 standards.
The system supports up to 100 users on the Basic G-Suite tier (£4.14 per user per month) and 250 on the Enterprise tier (£20). There are three paid tiers.
Customers can trial the platform for free for 14 days.
Delta users liked the price and ease of integration/use of Google's Hangouts products, highlighting its in-browser functionality. However, some worried about Google's business model and how it might affect confidentiality.
In response to the pandemic, Google has extended its Hangouts Meet offering to schools using G-Suite for Education, including "the ability to record meetings, livestream up to 100k people and add 250 people to a Hangout".
Jitsi-Meet
Jitsi-Meet is a free, fully encrypted open-source video conferencing tool. There are apps for Apple, F-Droid and Android, whereas desktop users create and join meetings via a WebRTC-compatible browser (Chromium-based preferred). Alternatively, Jitsi can be installed on a server for self-hosting.
Registration is not required and passwords and pins are optional. Users can set up a video meeting immediately simply by sharing a link.
Meetings can be recorded and livestreamed, YouTube videos can be shared and the usual screen and file sharing features are supported. Jitsi integrates with Slack and there that APIs to allow video to be added to other third-party applications.
Slack
Slack is best known for its text-based chat but paying users can also make video calls with up to 15 people. Prices start at £5.25 per user per month.
Free users are restricted to one-to-one video calls. Slack also integrates with third-party meeting software, including Zoom, Webex, Skype, Hangouts and Jitsi.
Facebook's ubiquitous WhatsApp messaging app also offers voice and video conference calling. It is available for all platforms and is free to use, with end-to-end encryption for confidentiality.
Communication is over mobile networks or WiFi and may be adequate for small groups.
Competitor Viber has doubled its group call participants limit to 20 in the wake of coronavirus. Calls, messages and shared documents are end-to-end encrypted, however there is no video option.
Apple FaceTime
FaceTime allows users to make audio and video calls from iOS and macOS devices. It is free to use, but as a proprietary Apple standard, it will not work on other devices and operating systems.
If all your team members are on Apple devices then FaceTime would be an obvious choice for catch-ups, but this restriction rules it out for flexible multi-party meetings where access to Macs and iPhones cannot be guaranteed.
Jami
Jami is a free, open-source, peer-to-peer, cross-platform, SIP-compatible audio and video conferencing service developed and maintained by the Canadian firm Savoir Faire Linux.
It offers end-to-end encryption for chat, file sharing, video and voice and there's no limit on the number or duration of calls.
It is available for all main desktop and mobile platforms, although features differ across each.
Overall, this is a bleeding-edge tool that's probably only viable for small technically savvy teams at this stage.
This article first appeared on our sister title Computing
07 December 2021
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3 min read
