Businesses spent a lot of time and money in 2020 adjusting to the COVID-19 pandemic. One could argue that many of them didn’t have a plan until it was to the point where either they made one, or their business collapsed. Some collapsed anyway. It has been a difficult year with businesses that have made it through doing the right things and using a set of new tools that allowed their operations to remain effective. Many of these tools will be phased out when the time comes, but one is absolutely here to stay: video conferencing.

The Pandemic Technology

If there has been one technology that has defined social distancing, it has been video conferencing. You’d be hard pressed to find many people who haven’t attended at least one Zoom meeting in the past year and many of today’s most utilized communications tools have built-in face-to-face meeting capabilities.

For the business, however, there needs to be a little more than the one-on-one capabilities found in Facebook Messenger or Apple’s Facetime. That’s where each business needs to find a solution that they like and has the features they need. After all, if your video conferencing solution is going to be one of your business’ most important communication and collaboration tools, you will want to have access to features that will allow it to be that type of tool for your business. Here are five features that any video conferencing solution needs to have if it is going to be effectively used for business purposes:

1. Multiple User Capabilities - As stated above, being able to video chat with other people is an option available on many standard messaging platforms. When using it for business, however, you need the ability to host meetings with multiple users. Many of today’s top solutions support multiple webcams and have a feature that automatically switches to the person that is talking/presenting to ensure that everyone gets integrated into the meeting successfully. 
2. Voice over Internet Protocol - A VoIP-based video conferencing solution has additional benefits. First, it’s as easy as connecting to a phone call. Additional benefits include the ability to switch out to an outside phone call at the click of a button and switch back just as simply, and it has organizational benefits as well as you won’t have to find a third-party application to run your meetings through, it can all be done through your cloud-hosted VoIP platform. 
3. Screen Sharing - Many people need visual representation of concepts for them to be effective. Inside a video conferencing solution, being able to quickly share your screen gives anyone in the meeting the ability to provide better visual context to any discussion. It can also be great for presentations that require one person to talk from slides. 
4. HD Video - Speaking of presentations, nothing is worse than having a virtual meeting and getting video playback that is pixelated and laggy. For the best meeting experience possible, HD video is mandatory. With HD, you always know who is speaking and any video playback you need to view is crisp and vibrant.
5. Recording Capabilities - One often overlooked feature that many businesses can benefit from is the ability to record everything that happens in your meetings. Almost every video conferencing solution provides the ability to record, but look for one that provides a cloud-hosted storage for meeting recordings to ensure that not only do you have the meeting recorded, that everyone with credentials can get at it.

These are only five of the dozen or more features that the modern video conferencing solution has, but they are some of the most important. Hopefully there will be a time when we don’t have to worry about COVID-19 anymore, but video conferencing is one technology that got many people through the pandemic and will be a big part of business communications from now on.

If you would like help finding the video conferencing solution that can work best for your business, call the IT professionals at Dresner Group today at (410) 531-6727.