Become Work-from-home Ready
As companies face travel challenges and strive to become work-from-home enabled, many are considering communication and collaboration solutions. Fortunately, there are options that can be implemented quickly and will facilitate ongoing productivity.
(While this article focuses on communication and collaboration solutions, ATC can also help with connectivity to make sure your work-from-home employees can access your business-critical applications.)
This is the good news… there are options. The bad news is there are a variety of options. Your decision-making may be dictated by what you currently have in place. For instance, if you have a UCaaS system, there may be features and functionalities that can simply be enabled or added on. Or, if you’re on Office 365, you may lean toward Microsoft Teams.
A UCaaS solution, hence the name “unified communications,” brings everything together onto one platform. For businesses still saddled with an on-premise phone system, there may be no better time than now to consider cloud telephony. It’s matter of when, not if.
Just to make the solution set easier to consume, ATC has broken the “collab” segment into four different categories—UCaaS Centric, Teams Centric, Webshare Centric and Video Conference Centric. Below are few options (there are others) worth considering in each. Many of these “do” similar things (i.e. Microsoft Teams has a video component), but below is focused what they do best (centric).
Keep in mind that your work-from-home employees will need reliable bandwidth to run voice and video calls, a minimum of 50x5Mbps. Of course, ATC is happy to help. It’s what we do. Let’s take a deeper dive and see which solution best fits your needs! Contact us to set up some demos.
UCaaS Centric with Teams, Webshare & Video Built In
8×8 – 8×8 cloud communications solutions, including the 8×8 Virtual Office, provides businesses with everything they need to collaborate and win. Enterprise-grade cloud phone, chat, video conferencing and collaboration capabilities allow organizations to enhance every employee and customer interaction.
RingCentral (uses Zoom) – RingCentral offers a complete web conferencing solution for business with HD video conferencing, team collaboration, screen sharing, and large-scale webinars. Hold face-to-face meetings, chat, share desktops, applications, and whiteboards with anyone, anytime, anywhere, and engage with large audiences in virtual events.
Vonage Meetings – Vonage Meetings is the latest in a series of innovations to Vonage Business Communications (VBC), enhancing Vonage’s unified communications offering at no additional cost and solidifying its status as one of the most flexible communications platforms.
Teams Centric
Microsoft Teams – Microsoft Teams provides features galore, including tight connectivity with Office 365. It’s a great team messaging app if your organization is a Microsoft shop. Microsoft Teams combines video conferencing software with team collaboration tools. The communications platform allows MS Office users to conduct conference calls and share files via SharePoint and join or initiate a group chat.
Cisco Webex Teams – Cisco Webex Teams (formerly Cisco Spark) is a cloud-based video conferencing solution providing collaboration tools that allow teams to create, meet, whiteboard and share, regardless of geographical location. Webex Teams keeps people and teamwork connected anytime, anywhere. Webex Teams brings together messaging, file sharing, video meetings, calling, and other tools to streamline teamwork and produce results faster.
Slack – Slack is a popular and well-crafted platform offering instant messaging, file transfers and powerful message search. It has many features and dozens of integrations with other tools like Trello and Intercom. Slack allows teams to create chat groups called ‘channels’ for transparent, open workplace communication. Apart from messaging, Slack also allows group video conferencing and screen sharing to conduct meetings more effectively.
Webshare Centric
Cisco Webex – Cisco’s WebEx provides personalized video meeting rooms where users can host and join meetings. WebEx can be used for team collaboration, webinars, training and customer support.
GotoMeeting– GoToMeeting is an online video conferencing software that allows users to schedule meetings and share screens. It’s one of the more popular video tools with millions of users. GoToMeeting is one of the easiest conferencing services to use, and its video conferencing feature keeps the app in play with today’s competitive market.
GlobalMeet – From PGi, GlobalMeet is a web-based video conferencing platform. It hosts a cloud PBX system and offers capabilities for incorporating team collaboration into video meetings. It is an award-winning, audio, web and video conferencing solution that makes global communications easy. Never a download or a plug-in and it works on any device, connecting people all over the world. It delivers a high-end collaboration experience for one-on-one meetings, team check-ins and can span to reach thousands as well.
Video Conference Centric
BlueJeans – BlueJeans is a cloud-based audio and video conferencing software with multi-vendor, multi-device interoperability with both mobile and browser integration for businesses of any size. BlueJeans also provides several collaboration tools and integration with commonly used applications.
Lifesize – Lifesize is a web conferencing platform focused on making video conferencing systems and video conferencing apps work well together, while still being easy-to-use. The Lifesize platform incorporates web conferencing software with meeting room devices and wireless screen sharing. Lifesize delivers audio, web, and video conferencing with the ability to easily record and share meetings all from one application.
Zoom – Zoom unifies cloud video conferencing, simple online meetings, and group messaging into one easy-to-use platform. Zoom is a unified communications platform primarily known for its use as a web conferencing tool. It features HD video and audio, collaboration tools, chat functionality, and an enterprise cloud phone system.
