Zoho Meeting helps you connect with colleagues even when you can’t be there in person. It’s not that different from Zoom or Microsoft Teams, providing basically the same service: bringing everyone together into the same virtual “room”, with live video and audio from all participants alongside shared chats, files, and whiteboard spaces. If Zoom’s many widely publicized privacy problems concern you, then Zoho Meeting is the single best Zoom alternative for business.
Like all of Zoho’s software, Zoho Meeting is browser-based, requiring no downloads or plug-ins to join or host a meeting. If you have any difficulty with audio or video through your browser, you can always download the Zoho Meeting desktop application for Windows and macOS.
Zoom Meetings has no limit on meeting length, no matter what edition you run, as well as a more consistent invite experience, and of course integration with Zoho’s other software products.
Even the free version is unexpectedly feature-rich. While the premium version includes tools like session recording, international dial-in numbers, presenter changes, webinar registrations, post-meeting follow-up emails, attendee polls, upcoming meeting reminders, and corporate branding, the free version includes essentially everything else. With the free version of Zoho Meeting, you can video chat without restraining limitations on call length, and invite up to 25 attendees at once to your conference.
Key Zoho Meeting Features for Business
- Conduct secure meetings with encrypted VoIP, telephony, text chat, and video, with no one trying to violate your privacy. Zoho is certified as compliant with EU-US and Swiss-US Privacy Shield Frameworks, as well as the EU’s GDPR regulations.
- Lock and eject troublesome participants to prevent the recent fad of “Zoom bombing” and keep meetings on track.
- Present your material in the best light with full-screen sharing, remote control of an attendee’s device, and annotations.
- Direct webinars, with presenter control over attendee microphones and video, allowing for Q&A without causing a ruckus throughout the whole presentation. Enable or disable video and audio for all participants to enforce meeting policies.
- Add your company’s name and logo to your Zoho Meeting email invitations, reminders, and notifications so clients are confident they’re speaking to the right people.
- Schedule meetings from your leads and contacts in Zoho CRM, initiate online meetings from Zoho Project, sync meetings from Zoho Calendar, and integrate seamlessly with other Zoho products.
- Host and join video and audio meetings from anywhere with Zoho Meeting mobile apps for iOS and Android.
Getting Started with Zoho Meeting
- Navigate to zoho.com/meeting to log in.
- Log into a Zoho account with access to Zoho Meeting. If your account doesn’t have access, you can opt for a free trial. There is also a free tier of the platform, providing the core chat functions.
- Tap or click Meet Now! to start a meeting with known people immediately. Use Start a Webinar to begin a broadcast to unknown people at a specific web address. Select Schedule a Meeting to put something on the calendar for later.
- Leave your meeting when done. Congrats, that’s it!
Organizing Useful Remote Meetings
Before you establish a remote meeting, take this opportunity to consider how valuable such a meeting will be. Will its value exceed that of the lost productivity for the total number of attendees, including preparation and wrap?
If the issue does not specifically require face-to-face communication, then consider text chat or email thread. However, for some tasks, meetings are essential. Despite the near-universal frustration meetings cause, they are still crucial for some aspects of our business lives: coordinating multiple employees on the same project, providing insight to a group of stakeholders, training employees on new policies and procedures, and so on.
It’s important that you don’t try to run video meetings just like an in-person meeting: we don’t interact the same way over video as we do in person. People lose focus and attention more easily and might not always be able to see or hear what you’re saying. Keep a tight itinerary, don’t extend the meeting’s duration needlessly, and get everyone involved in a meaningful way. Even activities like “sounding off” at the beginning of a meeting can be helpful to get folks engaged.
Conclusion
In times when we can’t meet together easily, whether due to geographic distribution or world events, video meeting systems provide an alternative. You might even find you like the flexibility and freedom so much, you’d rather not go back. Try out Zoho Meeting and see what you think.
