Innovations Drive Rapid Customer Adoption in Enterprise and Educational Organisations
Zoom Video Communications has announced a variety of new features and enhancements to its core Meetings platform and its Zoom Rooms software-based conference rooms. Altogether, these enhancements streamline administrator and user experiences and increase productivity as part of Zoom’s ongoing effort to create frictionless experiences for buying, deploying, using, and managing enterprise video communications. Zoom also announced the general availability of a feature it previewed at Zoomtopia last September: speech-to-text Recording Transcripts.
Sixty-two per cent (62%) of organisations use three or more communications solutions, but 100% of CEOs believe that their companies would achieve greater cost savings and effectiveness from communications platform consolidation (Forbes Insights Research, 2017). Due to its frictionless and comprehensive communications solution, Zoom has converted major enterprise and educational organisations over the past six months including HP and Brown University.
Updates for Zoom meetings include:
- Recording Transcripts: Machine learning-based Recording Transcripts create accurate, searchable speech-to-text transcripts of Zoom meeting and webinar recordings, particularly helpful in legal, content creation, and training use cases, and generally useful to anyone who misses a meeting. Zoom is the first meeting solution to bring this technology to market. It is now generally available to Zoom Business, Enterprise, and Education plan customers.
- 7×7 View: Zoom now allows users to see up to 49 video feeds on their desktop screen at once. Zoom supports up to 500 video feeds, so the user would page through the feeds by clicking on the right side of their Zoom window.
Updates for Zoom Rooms include:
- Zoom Rooms Scheduling Display: Zoom has unmoored its Scheduling Displays, so that these tablet schedulers (app runs on an iPad that sits outside the room to show upcoming meetings and allow for room reservations) can work for both Zoom Rooms and any other collaboration space. With the purchase of just one Zoom Rooms account and a customer can outfit their entire organisation with scheduling displays. Scheduling Display tied to Zoom Rooms is currently available to Zoom Rooms customers. Standalone Scheduling Display will be available later in Q1 2018.
- Streamlined Set-Up for Zoom Rooms: From purchasing hardware (available in five kits with more to come at zoom.us/zoomrooms/hardware), to deploying with Zoom’s Professional Services Team, to a simplified set-up flow, Zoom has made trying and rolling out Zoom Rooms easy. Customers can now try Zoom Rooms to join meetings without setting up an account. And for customers deploying hundreds of rooms in different locations, IT can simply give an activation code to the installer for instant room setup. This activation code feature is now available in Beta to Zoom Rooms customers.
“Zoom is here to take the work out of meetings,” said Zoom founder and CEO, Eric S. Yuan. “We’ve dedicated ourselves to the features and enhancements that pull all the friction out of video communications. We’ve made it easier to buy and deploy Zoom Rooms, we’ve made it simpler to schedule meetings and manage rooms. We’ve made it so you don’t even have to watch meeting recordings, you can just search the recording transcript. And on top of all that, we’ve created this incredible value of allowing our customers to outfit their entire organisation with scheduling displays at an exceptionally low cost. We knew it would make our customers happy, so we did it. All in all, we’re making the technology easier, so people can focus on the work at hand.”
About Zoom
Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, collaboration, chat, and webinars across mobile devices, desktops, telephones, and room systems. Zoom Rooms is the original software-based conference room solution used around the world in board, conference, huddle, and training rooms, as well as executive offices and classrooms. Founded in 2011, Zoom helps businesses and organizations bring their teams together in a frictionless environment to get more done. Zoom is a private company headquartered in San Jose, CA. Visit zoom.us and follow @zoom_us.
