When Zoom Is Not Enough
We are lucky to have Zoom…and Jitsi…and WebEx…and Google Hangouts…and Microsoft Teams, and all video conferencing for that matter — in these current times we live in. Just imagine if this pandemic had occurred even 10 years ago, when video conferencing was much less available and mature; life and business continuity would be much much more difficult.
That said, Zoom is not enough. Just as meetings alone are not enough. Things need to happen between Zoom calls to move conversations and initiatives along. And then of course there are networking events where the core purpose is meeting people who could be valuable connections. But how many times have you gone to a networking event (in person or virtual) where people said I’ll email you, I definitely will…and they didn’t?
For that matter email conversations are not enough either. They can be frustrating to follow — how many times have you looked for that important document that was shared in some email thread on some email subject line that no longer has any relevance? Or how many times have people forgotten to hit reply all, or hit reply all on responses that should be to just one person? How many times have you been added to an email trail late in the game and struggled to reconstruct the gist of the conversation? And how many messaging tools are you a member of — WhatsApp, Slack, Telegram, Teams, MatterMost?
Beyond internal productivity, things get even more complicated when there are multiple external stakeholders to interact with, all from different organizations. Or when there are security and confidentiality considerations that need to be incorporated.
All of these scenarios have a common theme — that Zoom is not enough.
The missing link is continuity — a mechanism for seamless ongoing interaction. A way to share knowledge, collaborate on projects, store and retrieve documents, engage with external stakeholders securely, oh and schedule that next Zoom call! A way to accomplish results in a virtual world with efficiency, security — and engagement. And a way to do so with a consolidated approach that eliminates the fragmented tools currently being used.
Take for example one of our clients, a private equity firm. They have multiple portfolio companies with their own operational teams — and often there are joint projects across companies or efficiencies to be derived from working together. They needed a way to share documents, collaborate, schedule and conduct meetings, manage projects — efficiently and securely. Weekly Zoom calls are only the starting point for them — and before implementing our platform, they were using emails, messaging, schedulers, project management tools, and document storage.
Another client is bringing together a number of organizations with common purpose into a collaborative ecosystem for action. They are using our multi-week “Sessions” functionality to create discrete working groups around different topics. Sessions combine content sharing, event scheduling, video conferencing, project management and messaging in a seamless “pod” per group, over a period of time.
These are just a few of many examples that reinforces that Zoom is great and has enabled the world to stay productive. But it is not enough! There are so many more stories about other organizations in today’s virtual world needing to elongate the connections between ‘meetings’ to move forward and get results. This is just the beginning…
