Video conferencing popularity explosion
During the COVID lockdown, video conferencing and remote dial in have become buzz phrases for organisations that had never considered using such technology earlier this year. Tools such as Microsoft Teams, Skype, Zoom and others have been eagerly installed and set up to allow staff and clients to communicate as easily as possible.
I’m not a fan of signing up for things unless absolutely necessary and in this landscape of GDPR and lost/stolen account details it’s really a matter of time before any one of the big organisations behind these tools, reports another incident of lost or stolen data.
Jitsi to the rescue
I discovered Jitsi Meet (https://meet.jit.si/) a few months ago and I’ve been using it successfully on my laptop, mobile phone and desktop PC. What I think is special about Jitsi Meet is that they don’t ask you to sign up to anything, you simply create a new meeting room and invite people by sharing the link to the room. It integrates with your Webcam and Microphone, allows you to set a secure password on the meeting room, and also share your screen with other meeting members. There is also a recording feature that uses an integration with Dropbox to save the entire meeting as a video file for you to watch or share later. Cool!
Its even easier than Skype as you also don’t need to install anything if you’re using either a laptop or a desktop PC running Windows, Linux or MacOS as it’s all done in the browser. How great is that!!!
There are apps for the mobile devices too (which you do need to install) but these are freely available (and again without having to sign up) on the respective app stores.
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.jitsi.meet&hl=en
Apple: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/jitsi-meet/id1165103905
I’m not affiliated with Jitsi Meet, but I love it so much that I wanted to share this with you and hopefully it will become a useful online tool in your own arsenal.