With Covid-19 almost everyone who can work from home is working from home. What are some of the technologies people employing to make remote work easier and also socializing with friends easier.
Collaboration Products
These are complete lines of products that allow for chat with individuals and groups, file sharing, audio and video calling, and on screen collaboration. The big players in this space are Slack and Microsoft Teams. Both offer similar types of services Microsoft actually was contemplating buying Slack but instead decide to roll out their own version as Teams. For a comparison of features and the story of why check out this article.
I am most familiar with Microsoft Teams which currently is making their product free to sign-up. Although upon looking at it it is free for schools for distance learning and for just free video calling they are pushing Skype which was the product Microsoft purchased. They rebranded their Lync program as Skype for Business, but that will be discontinued next year as Teams takes over the functionality. Probably both programs will get you similar results. If you heavily are already using Microsoft Office products you will probably want to look at Teams as it has pretty heavy integration with Office 365.
Video Conferencing Tools
Currently most of the tools that are available to you to use are:
- Microsoft Teams
- Slack
- WebEx
- Zoom – Note that there are current reports of privacy concerns.
- Skype
Again Teams and Slack are much more the collaboration tools useful for business. WebEx and Zoom also more geared for the business conference space. However we have had social meetups over WebEx for free. My wife is part of a crochet group that has also decide to meet up over Zoom. Many of these products have free or freemium options so they are worth checking out.
The Hardware You Need
WebCam
You may already have one if you are using a laptop so not a big deal there. If you need a webcam you can probably find one between $50-$80 that will give you good quality. The specs for these will be 1080p for video quality and about 30 FPS for streaming some will downgrade to 720p to give you 60 FPS streaming.
The current one I have is the Logitech C920 which gives good quality and has a fairly good stereo microphone. Currently though almost every store I see is sold out. Clearly there is now a lot of demand to be social online. Amazon has some but if you look they are 3rd party sellers who may be selling at about a 50% to 100% premium. A current search brings up these options. Again look for at least 30 FPS and 1080p (full HD 1920 x 1080) video and a good built in microphone. At this point many of the better models may be sold out or selling at a premium so check the reviews.
Microphone
Most webcams will have have built in microphones, so will your laptop. For most of the cameras the microphone is pretty good your laptop probably not so much. You may want to test your quality.
If you already use bluetooth with your phone you may want to pair that to your computer as a good option for for your microphone. One use is the Plantronics VOYAGER-5200-UC. I have been the same one for two years for business Skype and Teams meetings. It also has the advantage of a carrying case that charges. It also has its own dongle so you don’t have to go through bluetooth pairing and it works more reliably.
One More Thing on Bluetooth
I have dealt with a lot of corporate laptops and sometimes the included bluetooth drivers are unreliable if you have an Intel based laptop and Windows 10. I would recommend downloading and installing the latest driver here. You may get better results.
Happy chatting everyone as you social distance.
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