Before Coronavirus effectively shut down the world I was able to split my week between two days homeworking and three days meeting clients face to face. This put me in the fortunate position of being able to transition to lockdown fairly easily as circumstances forced my clients to reassess their working patterns and for those who I was meeting face to face to change to an online format. An additional advantage was that I was able to leverage my experience and help clients adjust to changes necessitated by the crisis.

To enable as smooth a transition as possible I invited my clients to use the platform of their choice and adapted to serve their needs. Consequently I have been using five platforms that I have rated in reverse order. For the purpose of these reviews I have not included paid high end platforms such as Cisco's Telepresence. and of course this is a personal view and naturally your views might differ.

So let the countdown begin…

5 Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams, which has been touted as the replacement for Skype for Business is just nasty! It only makes the list because the article is about providing a review.

It is fine if you are using it internally, but for external clients it is unwieldy and completely user unfriendly. It is difficult to set up and when adding clients it has the insistence that you add them to ‘Teams’ and to create a new team is difficult as it seems to want all your clients in one team. That doesn’t work for me and my clients as they should never be in a shared space.

It also repetitively gets confused between the app and browser version even when you have set the defaults. Furthermore it takes forever and a day to open.

Consequently when I conduct Teams meetings I do so as a guest on my client’s platform. This also causes the additional problem of not saving any chat which is used for links etc that goes alongside the meeting. However, this is retained for the client who has set it up.

With one client we managed to get it to work once (he seems to think that it works better if you have the contact in your Outlook Contacts) and had theoretically ironed out the problems, but subsequently we had endless problems and switched to another platform.

So it is counter intuitive, unfriendly and well avoided.

The one redeeming quality of teams in that its quality and reliability (in the sense of no outages) is quite high.

4 Zoom

Since lockdown began everyone has gone Zoom mad. It works, and is quite reliable but setting it up and quality are quite poor even with a good internet connection. The need to enter a password every time is annoying as is the unreliability of the regularly scheduled meetings feature.

Icons for opening features are small and difficult to find and I still find it hard to find the timer (I found it once) which in my case when I bill by the hour (but make allowances for outages) is just a pain in the… Chat elements of the meeting are not saved. Furthermore the chat is small and hard to read unless you have perfect vision.

Although there are time restrictions on multiple participants (temporarily lifted during the onset of the Corona crisis) there are work arounds and large numbers of people can be added relatively unproblematically.

3 Skype

Good old Skype, probably the first VoIP platform still holds its own. It is easy and intuitive to use. Chat and file sharing sit comfortably alongside the main interface and the chat conversations are retained, which helps with session continuity. I often leave a little 'note to self' as a reminder to help me pick up where I left off.

Of course if you are in another window Skype fairly uniquely has the little postcard window so you can swap comfortably between windows while maintaining 'eye contact' with your client without the need to split screens or divide up your Windows. Of course multiple screens can also counter that but few of us have that at home.

It is a well-known fact that Skype has reliability issues and this is its one drawback. Conversations can become tinny or interrupted and the video can become pixelated. Calls are often interrupted and sometimes dropped (when interrupted it is often better to end the call and reconnect – it is quicker!)

2 Skype for Business

Skype for Business is just like Skype but more reliable, the only issue is that it does not retain chat if joining as a guest. There is not much else to say as it has already been said other than why the hell have Microsoft brought in teams to replace it?

It is like me going from my laptop back to my ZX81 almost 40 years ago.

As with Windows 8 and the killing of the Windows button Microsoft are onto a loser with Teams. Long live Skype for Business or even better consider using…

1 Facebook

Yes I did just say that. Facebook Messenger is wonderful. It is easy to use and commutes easily across operating systems and devices. Chat is retained and it is completely intuitive to use. Quality and reliability are both high and out of the five it is the one I am happiest with.

But it’s Facebook I hear you say…

It is not quite perfect and there are three potential problems of differing degrees.

Firstly, it is Facebook and you can only contact people who are ‘friends’. This means they have access to all of your Facebook information (dependent on the security and sharing options that you have set up). Do you really want clients to see your selfies and holiday snaps?

Of course although Facebook frown upon it, why not set up a ‘professional’ Facebook with only information you are happy to share with your clients and only include them as friends.

Secondly, if including multiple participants the group chat is not accessible on the same window as the meeting and you would need to go back to the messenger element on your regular Facebook page.

An easy work around, rather than flitting between windows, is to use your phone for messaging or vice-versa when in chat.

Thirdly, it is Facebook and naturally you have to have a Facebook account to use it. This also means it is Zuckerberg with his unregulated hypocritical standards and who knows whether he is recording your conversations or not and then who your information is available to later.

This latter is an issue whichever platform you use. So as always we should be careful with our online activity.

One contender I haven’t mentioned is the Google platforms; hangouts or chats. I have very little experience of them, but Google is probably a bigger monster than Facebook, so even if it is good it is a muchness of a muchness.

This is why I will, wherever possible, stick with Facebook for online meetings.*