Episode 173 – Zoom, Teams, and Slack, Oh My!

In Episode 173, Ben and Scott talk about their experiences with online meeting platforms such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Slack as all of us continue to cope with remote work. Transcript Email Download New Tab - Welcome to Episode 173 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro podcast recorded live on April 9, 2020. This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure from the perspective of IT pros and end users, where we discuss a topic or recent news and how it relates to you. In this episode, with the recent uptake in usage of Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Slack, Ben and Scott compare the tools and discuss why people should stop pitting these tools against each other. This is not our sleepy Scott and Ben. This is our wide awake Scott and Ben. I don't know if that would be better or worse. - Tell you what, it would be something. - It would be something. - Oh, so. - Here we are, week 534 of staying at home. - Of Isolation. - I no longer know what day it is. I no longer know what month it is. It's just another day. I was thinking of "Groundhog Day." Remember the movie, "Groundhog Day?" - Do I remember it? I've been watching it lately. Yes, it's an excellent movie. - It is we're reliving "Groundhog Day". We just wake up and it's always today. It's never tomorrow. - Yeah. If you're looking for another fun Bill Murray movie, in this time of isolation and sitting back and you've never seen it, you should go check out, "What about Bob?" - What about, I remember "What about Bob?" - "What about Bob?" is one of those classics that just holds up over time. - You know what? - So well. Baby steps. - I need to go watch it again. It has been a long time. I think I only watched it once. - It's time to get back in. And have you finished up, "Tiger King" yet? - I have not started and I refuse to start. - Oh, c'mon! Don't be that way. We can have a whole discussion about whether Carol actually killed her husband. What did Joe do? Oh man, we gotta get you into it. - No, I have talked to people and everybody is like, it is absolutely terrible but I guess, then, I watched the whole thing cause I just had to see the train wreck. - Yeah, you know we tried to stop after episode one but then you know they auto play so quick. I swear the vendor searches starting things quicker now. I've noticed on both Netflix and Prime, you're sitting there, Prime is really fast. Prime Video, it's three seconds and the next thing starts, the next episode, and you're going whoa, hold on! I didn't even have time to grab the remote, so yeah. - That's funny. Yeah, it's funny that's what I keep hearing from people. They're like, I watched the first episode or I watched first episode and a half and it was so terrible I was gonna turn it off but I couldn't. Isn't that the epitome then, of a great, a great job by the writers or something? To create something that everybody thinks is so terrible they wanna stop watching it but they can't. - Yeah, I will tell you. It was shot in an excellent way. The team that shot it and made the documentary, they're great at getting the shot. They have some of just shocking conversations with people. You don't even know how they got them on video to the point where you think it's a movie but then, you recognize that these people are just that dumb to say these things on camera. Or maybe they're that cerebral and that smart? I really don't know. Just some of the things, like you watch through the B-roll they have is great through the whole thing and they weave an excellent story. If you're looking to waste 5 hours of your life, it is there. - There is always that. As IT professionals, in the cloud era, sometimes it feels like we don't speak the same language as the rest of the organization. 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So, with a terrible segue, should we move from talking about video on Netflix and Amazon and all the fun video we've watched to video on meetings. And some of the discussion that's happened in the last couple of weeks around different web conferencing platforms, and I've may even pull some other platforms in here because it's been interesting. As everybody has gone and started working from home to see this whole, really a battle, is what I would call it between specifically Teams and between Zoom. - Yeah, let's get in to it. I'm excited. - And just some of interesting things too, you've noticed. You said you've noticed there's some Teams with edu. But I will say I had an update. So, transparency, I use Zoom every week. We use Zoom for the podcast. We're using it right now. And if anybody wants to join, our meeting code is, no, I'm not gonna do that. But I could. - C'mon, you could though. - I could though. Because I've installed a couple Zoom updates. Zoom has been throwing out updates daily, over the last week or so. I don't know when this update happened. Because in all fairness, we last used Zoom when we recorded six days ago. And I haven't started another Zoom meeting since then. But you used to click on our link for our podcast that would let you right in. You could do all of that. Today, you went to join and it said, you have to wait for Ben to start the meeting. And then, I started the meeting and you joined. And then, I got a pop up that you were waiting in the, I don't know, if they call it the lobby or whatever, you were waiting and I had to admit you. - I did not make, I just thought your Zoom OPSEC was getting that much better and you were trying to annoy me, in all the wrong ways. - Yes and I didn't. I have not updated. Well, I did update the meeting invite. It may have gone and pull out some different settings. But I did not update any settings or anything around our meeting. Other than, I did have to reschedule it cause we're recording on Thursday instead of Friday. And all of this stuff just got turned on by default for a pre-existing scheduled meeting. So, I am not doing any better at my Zoom OPSEC. Apparently, Zoom is and rightly or wrongly, they just went and enabled all of the stuff on my meetings that I already had scheduled. I had no idea. Who knew? So, one piece of advice, if you are using Zoom and you want some of these settings at the way they were originally, you may wanna go look at your settings. You may have to make some changes or people might not be able to get into your meeting until you get there. - I think there's somethings like that. Yeah, they have just been pushing out all these updates and it's like every other day, I've seen an update to the Zoom client, locally. But there have been some good blogs other there from folks like Liam Cleary had a really good one: Still using Zooms for meetings; Wanna still keep using Zoom for meetings; here are somethings that you might wanna take a look at. Just to make sure that you are maybe positioned the right way and that you have setup some of this settings in a manner that actually puts you in a better place. - Yeah and they did add a security tab at the bottom now, too. So, I have a separate tab now where I can just click security and I can go do it, go in and do things like enable that waiting room or lock the meeting and choose what I want to allow participants to do. So, there's some really nice updates that have come out of this. I think, getting on my soapbox for a minute, the part that bugged me about all of this, when all of this came out was, I'm not gonna call anybody out by name, there were some people that were non-Microsofties, there were some Microsoft people that I saw saying this is everybody all of a sudden jumped on, Zoom is terrible. Go use Teams because Zoom has horrible security. It was instilling this sense of fear in a bunch of people that used Zoom. Saying that it was terrible-- - Ah yes, the FUD. - Right. Saying it was this terrible, insecure platform. Stop using it all together. And yes, there were obviously some security things that have come out of this. There's been some security things about the whole end-to-end encryption and where it's sending data. But at the end of the day, even before all of this, I have used Zoom for years. There were certain settings you can enable. You have always been able to password protect meetings. You've always been able to set different 10 digit invitation URLs. They've had those 10 digit URLs forever. There were ways you could protect it. And I genuinely was not worried about using Team or Zoom when all of this stuff start coming out. My daughter was using Zoom meetings for other stuff. I was like, you know what, I know the people running the meetings. I'm sitting here, I'm seeing the meetings, I'm seeing how they have it set-up. You could secure your meetings fairly well if you knew what you were doing, made the right settings, made the right adjustments. I will give them that, yes, it's not as secure as Teams. If you look at the URL to join a Teams meeting, it is significantly longer. There is more security around Teams. But at the end of the day, I felt like Zoom got a little bit of a bad rap from some people in terms of how