With everyone working from home, some of you must be wondering about video conferencing software. I tend to use software offered by Google but as you will pick up later in this post, products offered by Google can be difficult to understand and use.

Roughly, here are the options for video meeting software. 

1. Zoom.us

Zoom is located in San Jose, CA. This is a very popular program. It is free for up to 100 people for 40 minutes. For quick meetings, it is pretty good. I have used it quite a bit. One nice feature is that you can record meetings and post them later. Here is a link to pricing: https://zoom.us/pricing

2. AnyMeeting.com - It’s FREE until 2021

AnyMeeting was purchased by Intermedia (Mountain View, CA) in September 2017, which is about the time that I stopped using this program. Actually, it is pretty good. I’m not sure why I stopped using it. 

3. Meet.Google.com

Google’s product in this space is called Meet but it is easily confused with Hangouts (soon to be for consumers only), Chat (a competing product to Slack and MS Teams, and Duo (kind of like FaceTime).

Let me start with an apology. I’m sorry if I screw up and give you some incorrect information. It seems that anything offered by Google is confusing. You would think that a company that in 2019 generated $161 billion in revenue and $34 billion in earnings could make things a bit simpler - but no - it’s complicated. 

The part that is confusing is that you can’t schedule a meeting at a future date from the main page. You can start a meeting here and invite people or join a meeting, but you can’t schedule a meeting.

To schedule a meeting at some time in the future, you need to go to your calendar and create an “event”. Well, at least that is how I do it using Gmail in G-Suite. If you are using Outlook or something else, then I have no idea of the steps that you should take.

Starting with Google Calendar makes sense after you do this for the first time but until then you will be totally lost. Well, maybe you won’t be, but I sure was. I had to do a search on YouTube for instructions. But I’m not the smartest guest in the meeting... Let me know if you encounter something different.

Here are the steps to schedule a meeting at some point in the future using Google Calendar. 

a) Go to your Google Calendar

b) Scroll to the day of the meeting

c) Click on the time that you want. You should get a pop-up

d) Be sure that you have selected event

e) Add a title for the meeting

f) Check the time to be sure that you have the right start and end times

g) Add the guests that you want to attend the meeting

h) Click on More options to add more details (like conferencing which is the whole point!)

i) Click on add conferencing and select Hangouts Meet

j) Add a description if you want

k) Save and Send

Once you click Save, Google will give you a URL for the meeting, a phone # and a PIN. You may have to let your guests know that they can use the phone number to call in if they don’t have a microphone and speakers. 

More Phone Numbers will give you a long list of numbers by country.

That’s it. Enjoy your online meetings.

Jeff Nelson