We’re a large household with a small business, and we find ourselves with an interesting mix of tools for chat, screen sharing, and video conferencing. Here are our favorites!
Work Life
The tools we use for work include TweetDeck, Teams, Skype, and GoToMeeting.
TweetDeck
I’ve been connecting with other IT professionals on Twitter since 2009. TweetDeck an excellent tool for networking, promoting events and products, and – of course – keeping in touch with friends and family scattered over the globe. Formerly an app, TweetDeck is now a dashboard on Twitter itself. You can manage separate accounts, schedule tweets, and customize your view of the tweeting world.
Microsoft Teams
Teams is “the evolution and upgrade path from Microsoft Skype for Business”. Just like in Skype, you can text chat, have video and audio meetings, and share files. Teams also integrates with Office 365 (including OneNote and Sharepoint), and lets you schedule meetings within the app.
The MinionWare team uses Teams for all of this, and it’s been a good experience overall. We share thoughts and plans in chat, schedule regular status meetings in-app, get a reminder and join the call when it’s time. We have noticed that sharing screens in Teams takes up a lot of system resources, and can slow down heavier operations, like Visual Studio. But, as we don’t use this option a lot, it hasn’t detracted from the experience.
Skype
“But why,” you rightfully ask, “do you use Skype if you use Teams?” We still have a few clients and friends that haven’t moved away from Skype, so it’s still on the phone and all the laptops!
Unlike Teams, Skype doesn’t tie into Office. We also note that managing contacts is a bit of a pain – you can designate favorites, but there’s no other way to group or meaningfully sort them. Also, it’s open: anyone out there can just send you a message. Even with these drawbacks, Skype is another good platform, and provides good chat, video, and screensharing.
GoToMeeting
GoToMeeting is an excellent screenshare provider. We can schedule meetings and share screens in Teams, but this is what GoToMeeting is designed for. We take advantage of GTM’s great audio and meeting controls for classes, product demonstrations, and public presentations.
In a GTM presentation, we can must and unmute attendees, use the chat to communicate to individuals or the whole group, and so on. Plus, an attendee can choose to dial in to a phone number, or use the computer audio.
GTM is a paid service, but the money goes to features we need. The only real drawback is, we’re limited to recording screenshares (not video), as we haven’t been able to setup recording to the cloud.
Family Communication
About a year ago, we found ourselves needing a better solution to in-family communication than random text messaging. We tried a couple of things, and settled on our kids’ recommendation: Discord.
“Discord is a free voice, video and text chat app for teens and adults ages 13 and up. It was created to bring people together through a love of gaming. Teens can access Discord via their PC, browser, or mobile phone. Once there, they can join a chat they’ve been invited to or they can create private servers and invite their friends to play and discuss games by voice, text or video. They can also message each other individually or in group chats with up to ten other friends.”
From Discord.com
Here again, Sean and I feel differently about Discord. He cites performance issues, and disliking the chat and channel organization. On the other hand, I love being able to set up a private server, with multiple channels and direct messaging. Our family has one general “all family” channel, one for links and memes, one for school, and various others for combinations of members (e.g., dad_mom_daughter).
There is one big down side that doesn’t have a big effect on us, but may for other families with kids: just like any open platform, they can message anyone in the world. If your kids are agreeable and knowledgeable about internet safety, there are controls that will help keep them safe from unwanted contacts. But if you’ve got a kid who likes breaking the rules, well, there aren’t any parental controls.
Of course, that’s true for most communication platforms your kids can get on, including Twitter and Skype. We just happen to use Discord, and not Skype for family communication.
Summary
Our favorite communication tools, in a nutshell, are:
- TweetDeck – Networking, promoting events and products, connecting with friends and associates.
- Microsoft Teams – A good platform. Chat, meetings, file sharing, Office integration. Screen sharing is a bit of a resource hog here, but we like the app.
- Skype – Another good platform, and provides good chat, video, and screensharing.
- GoToMeeting – Our preferred method for sharing screens, especially for demonstrations and classes.
- Discord – Our go-to application for family communication!