After advice on teams / zoom

[Some Gump]

Hey Forum,

I'm trying to arrange an online murder mystery thing for someone's birthday, and so need to either use teams (which I use daily) or Zoom (which I'm not really familiar with).

Will be 8 or 10 participants, but made of 4 or 5 couples so poss. some may choose to share 1 device (which could be any laptop / tablet device, I'm not sure what everyone uses). Obviously we'd want at least 5 people to be visible all the time, like zoom seems to be good at. I suspect that it might be more comfortable for people to use one each though, because sitting right on top of each other to stay in the camera view gets a bit awkward at times.

Thing is, I don't have zoom, so would have to use multiple 40 minute meetings on that platform. That sounds like it would get in the way a lot and since I've never used zoom, probably would need me to dry run somehow. From what I have seen though, Zoom's party view thing is pretty much perfect.

I have fully paid up teams and use it every day. I've worked out that people without teams can just join one of my meetings via the web, but can they then set it to see multiple people at once like full fat teams? It sounds strange but since I've only ever used it for work, every participant will have full fat O365 as a matter of course.

In work, normally someone is presenting but when not I often get up to 4 with shared cameras. As soon as it goes above that, you get the person talking big and the rest in the little stripe along the bottom. Is there a way to make it go into the 3 x 3 view that I've googled? Web seems to say you need 10 participants but obvs not having this means teams seems a little restrictive (only having choice of 4 videos or 9, with nothing in between?)

May well have this totally confused, as you may expect from someone asking a car forum on how to use software =)

Thanks in advance for any advice

Gump

[DanoS4]

FYI, I lecture using Teams (actually responding to this whilst in an online class - they're all on a task!)

Teams works well for this - I've currently got 22 people in the "meeting", using a range of mobile and desktop devices.

They can even use breakout rooms to discuss things in peace & quiet with other students in their group.

Not used Zoom, but by all accounts there's limitations with it.
However, Facebook Messenger now does this type of thing too?

Might be easier to use as it's a popular choice.........

[RizzoTheRat]

You can get a license for zoom just for the month, which does away with the 40 minute thing.

Microsoft have recently added a new feature to Skype that lets you sent an invitation to people, and they can chose to either install the app or use the web interface, so should work on any hardware.

We've been using a mix of Skype, Zoom and Google Hangouts for various pub quizzes and things and I don't think there's really a lot to choose between them.

One issue to watch out for if people in the same house are logging in from separate machines, if they're not on headsets you'll have feedback issues, and if they're both on headsets you'll get an echo (one person talks and the other persons mic pics them up with a slight delay) unless they're using business type headsets with noise cancelling mics.

[Some Gump]

Thanks guys!

[ZesPak]

In the past year I've set up:

• GoToMeeting
• Teams
• Hangouts
• Zoom
• WebEx
• Slack

And joined others on other platforms still.

Teams vs Zoom:

I prefer Zoom to give training's and demo's, there's a couple of limitations on both platforms (haven't used breakout rooms, but I do miss two-way screen sharing and screen pausing on Teams) but I think for doing what you want to do neither will matter. Both will allow you to join from practically any platform and Teams has come a long way in the past year catching up (early 2020 you could only see 4 people at the same time!). If you only have a Teams account I'd go with that.

[Paul Drawmer]

We use Google Meet.