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Zoom or Microsoft Teams – choosing the best digital whiteboard software for remote and collaborative working

Get the very most out of your digital whiteboard by picking the best videoconferencing software for you and your teams.

Since the COVID pandemic and the widespread embrace of remote collaborative working, there has been lively debate on the two most popular videoconferencing tools that have dominated the market: Microsoft Teams, and Zoom. As market-leading apps, they share a lot of the same features and capabilities – but in certain use-cases, one option is better-suited than the other. Read on to find out more about their similarities and differences to get the very most out of both apps.

It is worth noting, however, that you can always adopt both.

The advantages of using Zoom on your digital whiteboard for remote and collaborative work

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Well adapted for external videoconferencing calls

Do you intend to hold frequent video calls with external parties that sit outside of your organisation, or stakeholders from separate companies? If so, then Zoom should be your app of choice as it offer a seamless experience dialling in. With Zoom calls, participants can join from anywhere, on any device, provided that they have an internet connection. All they need is the link for connecting to the call.

On the other hand, meeting participants would need to have the Teams app on their device if they are connecting via phone or tablet – and if they are joining via their web browser, it will only work on Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge. The available features and navigation menu options are also very limited in video meetings when external organisations join the call. With these more restrictive factors in mind from Microsoft Teams, Zoom is a winner in terms of flexibility for external meeting participants.

Better able to handle larger-scale video meetings and slower internet

Looking at the technical specifications for both Microsoft Teams and Zoom, they actually come up equal – both offer HD resolution, and 30fps streaming. However, it is worth noting that while Microsoft Teams is designed more as an all-in-one collaborative working tool, Zoom is exclusively focused on videoconferencing. Each Zoom call can accommodate up to 1,000 participants, as opposed to the 300-participant limit for Microsoft Teams – and on Zoom, users are more likely to have a lag-free experience without video or audio dropouts.

The Zoom app also offers a ‘Focus mode’ feature, which enables meeting hosts to define which videos and streams should be prioritised over others. For example, at a company all-hands meeting, the organiser can prioritize the presentation stream and speaker’s audio over video streams from other participants.

The advantages of using Teams on your digital whiteboard for remote and collaborative work

Better accessibility features

When it comes to bridging the gap for meeting participants who are deaf or have impaired vision, for example, Teams offers a much better set of accessibility features. For example, with AI-powered live captioning always enabled, meeting participants who are hard of hearing can rest assured that they won’t miss anything in the meetings they attend. Meeting organisers can also include a sign language interpreter, whose stream can be pinned in the meeting view for anyone who needs it.

Teams also offers a text-to-speech reader for visually impaired participants, which Zoom does not include in its software.

A wider range of productivity-boosting features

While Zoom is 100% designed for video calls, Microsoft Teams is designed with a wider purpose in mind, so it offers a solid set of features for collaborative and remote working. For example, users can create lists of action items directly in the chat window during a meeting – and with the ability to tag participants and trigger notifications, everyone gets visibility on the progress of a project.

Once a meeting is over, it is also very easy to send a recording (complete with transcript) to all attendees. Along with file-sharing and real-time editing features, Microsoft Teams also offers up to 1TB of cloud storage space – which makes it especially well-suited to file-sharing.

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