Zoom For Dummies

Phil Simon

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781119742159
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Informatik
• Subtopic: Unternehmensanwendungen

Zoom into the new world of remote collaboration

While a worldwide pandemic may have started the Zoom revolution, the convenience of remote meetings is here to stay. Zoom For Dummies takes you from creating meetings on the platform to running global webinars. Along the way you'll learn how to expand your remote collaboration options, record meetings for future review, and even make scheduling a meeting through your other apps a one-click process. Take in all the advice or zoom to the info you need - it's all there!

• Discover how to set up meetings
• Share screens and files
• Keep your meetings secure
• Add Zoom hardware to your office
• Get tips for using Zoom as a social tool

Award-winning author Phil Simon takes you beyond setting up and sharing links for meetings to show how Zoom can transform your organization and the way you work.

Part 1

Staying Connected with Zoom

IN THIS PART …

Find out about Zoom and the core technologies behind it.

Discover how Zoom became the gold standard for videoconferencing.

Get to know Zoom’s robust suite of collaboration and communication tools.

Chapter 1

Communicating and Collaborating Better with Zoom

IN THIS CHAPTER

Explaining what Zoom’s tools do

Dissecting the reasons that Zoom grew so quickly

Understanding Zoom’s competitive landscape

What is Zoom anyway? Where did it come from? Was it the result of long-term planning, a eureka moment, or a happy accident? Is Zoom only for large organizations, or can smaller ones benefit from it? And what business problems does Zoom solve, anyway?

This chapter answers these questions in spades. Further, it provides some background information about Zoom, the technologies behind it, and its main competition.

Introducing Zoom

Zoom provides a suite of simple, affordable, powerful, secure, and interoperable communication and collaboration tools. As of this writing, the company’s self-purposed mission is to make video communications frictionless.

As you see in this book, Zoom has accomplished its mission in spades. Zoom’s management and investors bet the company on the belief that it could build a better mousetrap. With it, people could accomplish more than they could without it. Again, you can check that box. That gamble has paid off handsomely. It has vastly exceeded its early aspirations.

Discovering Zoom’s origins

In August 1997, Eric Yuan began working as a software engineer at Webex — one of the first enterprise-videoconferencing companies. Yuan grew his team from ten engineers to more than 800 across the globe. To paraphrase Ron Burgundy of Anchorman fame, Webex became kind of a big deal. On March 15, 2007, Cisco Systems acquired the company in a deal worth $3.2 billion.

At Cisco, Yuan rose to the level of VP of Engineering — a key role at a tech juggernaut. As part of his job, he spent a good chunk of his time talking to Webex enterprise customers about the videoconferencing program. To put it bluntly, many businesses disliked Webex’s complexity and general clunkiness. (Apropos of nothing, I felt the same way back then.)

After a few years, Yuan began to doubt whether Cisco would be able to improve Webex as much as its customers were demanding. To boot, other software vendors were starting to catch up. Yuan questioned whether Cisco’s management would invest the requisite time and resources required to build a new, better generation of videoconferencing products — one that could easily scale up and down as needed thanks to the rise of cloud computing.

Yuan wasn’t guessing; he exactly knew what enterprise customers needed. He envisioned a single, modern app that would seamlessly work on any device: laptop, computer, tablet, and smartphone. Because of his background, Yuan realized that minor tweaks to Webex’s legacy code base would not suffice. Rather, undertaking such an endeavor would require a ground-up product rebuild.

Yuan knew that transforming Webex at Cisco would require him to fight many bruising internal battles. After several relatively enjoyable post-acquisition years, the politicking was starting to wear Yuan down. As he told NBC in August 2019, “Every day, when I woke up, I was not very happy. I even did not want to go to the office to work.” (Visit cnb.cx/zfd-123 to read the article.)

Yuan predictably left Cisco in June 2011 and took 40 talented engineers with him. Later that month, he founded Zoom Video Communications, Inc. He wanted to refine a concept that he first conceived during the 1990s as a college student in China. Back then, Yuan had to commute ten hours to his then-girlfriend, now his wife. (Read the entire interview at bit.ly/zfd-eric.)

The company launched its flagship Meetings & Chat service in January 2013. Its target customers remained the same from Yuan’s Webex and Cisco days: other businesses. By May 2013, more than 1 million people used Zoom products. In March 2019, Zoom officially filed to go public on the NASDAQ. April 18, 2019, marked its first day of trading.

Understanding what Zoom does

Zoom’s tools help individuals, formal and informal groups, departments, and even entire organizations communicate and collaborate better. In this way, Zoom falls under the umbrella of technologies often labeled as Unified Communications (UC). The term first gained popularity in the mid-1990s. (I’m happy to report that I was there.) In a nutshell, UC describes a collection of integrated, enterprise-grade communication services. Specific examples include

• Instant messaging (IM): Also known as chat.
• Presence information: Status indicators that conveys one’s availability to communicate.
• Voice: This bucket includes calls or, more precisely, Internet Protocol (IP) telephony.
• Audio, web, and video conferencing: The ability to hold different types of calls with large groups of people.
• Desktop sharing: The ability to instantly see what your peer is doing.
• Data sharing: Interactive whiteboards, annotation, and the like.
• Unified messaging: Integrated voicemail, email, and fax.

You may not have heard of UC before now. Again, though, it’s not exactly new. In fact, the idea of using the web to do things such as make audio and video calls is almost as old as the web itself.

The following sidebar explains a bit of history behind some of UC’s technical underpinnings. Make no mistake: These pillars remain critical today even if they run seamlessly in the background. Feel free to skip the nearby sidebar, however, if you consider it too much information — or TMI, as the kids say today.

A BRIEF PRIMER ON COMMUNICATING OVER THE INTERNET

You probably have not heard of ARPANET, but you almost certainly use the technology behind it every day.

In the 1960s, the Cold War between the United States and the former Soviet Union was simmering. The two powers nearly destroyed each other during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Things got very real. In the aftermath of the near debacle, government officials began to wonder how citizens would communicate with each other in the event of a nuclear conflict and tens of millions of deaths.

Against this backdrop, the U.S. Department of Defense launched the Advanced Research Projects Agency. The agency began work on a decentralized network that would, at a high level, address that very question. Launched in 1969, ARPANET represented the first network of its kind. Back then, communication networks were primitive, especially by today’s standards. (If Netflix had existed back then, you would not have had any luck streaming 4K videos.)

But how would that network actually work?

Packets

Circuit-based networks are centralized in nature. Examples include traditional telephone systems. In the event of a nuclear war, one strategic missile would render the entire network inoperable. What’s more, they involve a great deal of manual intervention. That’s why switchboard operators manually patched through calls to recipients beginning in 1878. Brass tacks: The ARPA folks knew that a circuit-based network ultimately wo...