Are you team Zoom or team MS Teams? Comparing/contrasting 14 features – who will win? Part two

This is part two of “Are you team Zoom or team MS Teams?” Keep reading to find out the winner.

As I mentioned last week, I run a monthly Learning and Development Roundtable.  When I started delivering it online a couple of years ago, in the Roundtable description, I said that I used a tool called Zoom, like Skype but better.  

Fast forward and you’d be hard-pressed to find a human who hasn’t at least heard the term Zoom.  Which brings me to Team Zoom and Team Microsoft Teams.  Having used both of the platforms, I present to you a comparison and contrast of their features.

I shared the first half last week.

Who will be the winner?  Who’s the winner in your mind?

Onwards with the contest.

Each feature has been scored using the following:

Marvellous → the feature is great, easy to use etc. (3 points)

Meh → the feature is so-so, not horrible but not marvey (2 points)

Miserable → the feature is really lacking (1 point)

Here are the fourteen features I’ve compared:

Part one:

• Participant metrics
• Polling
• Annotation
• Whiteboard
• View options
• Share screen
• Taking pictures of your participants

Part two:

• Sharing documents, your powerpoint deck etc. during your call
• Breakout rooms with randomly divided groups
• Breakout rooms with prescribed groups
• Making broadcast to breakout rooms
• Closing the breakout rooms and bringing participants back to the main group
• Chat
• Bandwidth

Zoom Score	Feature	MS Teams Score
Meh Zoom doesn’t make this easy.	Sharing documents, your powerpoint deck etc. during your call	Marvellous! This is where the MS ecosystem comes into play.  When you create a Teams meeting, you can easily make a wiki, upload content etc.  Brilliant!
Marvellous! Zoom makes it easy to divide your group into random groups.	Breakout rooms with randomly divided groups This is when it doesn’t matter who’s with who in the breakout rooms.	Marvellous! Ditto.
Miserable If you have a large group, forget it. Dividing people into prescribed groups is time-consuming and a hassle.	Breakout rooms with prescribed groups This is when you want certain people to be in a breakout room with certain people	Miserable Ditto.  MS Teams makes this time-consuming and miserable if you have a large group. Pro tip: you can divide the groups up ahead of time into separate MS Team meetings and then send them an email right before it’s time to divide up and then they head into a separate meeting.  This can be confusing for folks and you’re not able to broadcast messages to the various groups while they’re in breakout.
Marvellous! Zoom easily allows you to send messages to the breakout rooms	Making broadcast to breakout rooms  Sending messages to the small groups	Marvellous! MS Teams also easily allows you to send messages to the breakout rooms
Marvellous! Once you click on close the groups, Zoom gives an ample 60 seconds before it automatically brings the participants back to the main room.	Closing the breakout rooms and bringing participants back to the main group	Meh Once you click on close the groups, MS Teams gives a measly 10 seconds before it automatically brings the participants back to the main room.  This tends to frustrate participants as they get very little warning and get cut off mid-sentence.
Meh Zoom has a pretty good chat function, but I’ve had clients complain that they can’t comment specifically on a comment which can get confusing.	Chat	Marvellous! MS Teams chat function is great and clients love that you can comment directly on a comment which makes the chat easier to follow.
Meh Zoom can really use up bandwidth but overall is pretty good.	Bandwidth This is an admittedly unscientific rating.  It’s based on my exasperation with how long things can take to load and also by looking at my activity monitor, which measures what percentage of my CPU is being used by which program.	Miserable MS Teams is a hog when it comes to the intertubes.  Truly.  The delays can be painful.

There you have it.  Fourteen features compared and contrasted on Zoom and Microsoft Teams. 

And the winner is ……. drum roll, please …… with 37 points out of a possible 45  …… Zoom!  MS Teams comes close though, with 32 points.  

Dig into the features you haven’t yet tried and zero in on the ones that intrigue you.  Most of all, let the tool, regardless of whether you use Zoom and/or MS Teams, serve you versus the other way around.

Now go on and learn, laugh and lead

Learn

I’d love to hear your experience.  Do you agree or disagree?  Are there any features you’d add?  Let me know in the comments below.

Laugh

If you need a chuckle or three, simply google Zoom or MS Team fails.  Last week’s example was a Zoom fail.  Here for your chuckling pleasure is a Teams fail. Thirsty anyone?

Lead

• On your next Zoom or MS Teams meeting try one of the features above to add some more engagement to your meetings and/or workshops.

P.S. Want to receive invitations to my monthly Learning and Development Roundtables that I mentioned in the intro? Easy peasy. Sign up here.