Bryn Mawr College has site licenses for two tools you can use to host online meetings: Zoom and Microsoft Teams.*

• Both offer the same basic features:
  • You can schedule meetings within and outside Outlook
  • BMC and non-BMC attendees can participate
  • Participants can share audio, video and screens
  • Participants can chat and non-verbal responses (emoji).
• They compete directly for market share, and each tends to copy features developed by the other.
• Although both offer built-in English-language ASR captioning (aka live transcription), they use different AI systems to generate them. If you use this feature, try both platforms to see which works best for your meeting contexts.

*Note: There is a third option, Skype for Business, but Microsoft will be ending support for it on July 31, 2021. Use Teams or Zoom instead. 

Zoom

• Zoom was designed for web conferencing.
• It is currently the best option for academic course-related meetings due to integrations with Moodle and Panopto:
  • Schedule online meetings with the  Zoom activity in Moodle to automatically make them available to all course participants.
  • Record to the cloud to automatically add to the Panopto course folder and list in the Panopto block.
• Zoom supports human-generated captioning (aka CART services), and is the best choice if captioning is required as a disability accommodation.
• Zoom is currently the best choice for public-facing meetings:*
  • Zoom has a built-in registration option that lets you safely publicize a meeting registration link and only log-in details with those who register.
  • Zoom meetings recorded to the cloud are automatically uploaded to Panopto, where you can host them for long-term, on-demand viewing.

*Teams has recently added Webinar and Live Event functionality, but these features aren’t yet as mature or easy to use as Zoom’s.

Teams

• Teams was initially developed as instant-messaging (IM) app for Office 365, but Microsoft has steadily added voice calling and meeting capabilities.
• If you used Skype for Business for calls and meetings, Teams provides the most similar experience.
• Teams integrates well with other Microsoft products like Outlook, OneNote, and OneDrive.
• Microsoft is actively developing translation tools: ASR transcription within Teams is still English-only, but participants can translate chat messages and use Teams with Microsoft Translator for real-time translation of audio.