MICROSOFT TEAMS VERSUS ZOOM

In recent weeks, Microsoft Teams has seen an enormous jump in new users joining their platform, with 12 million daily active users coming onboard in the space of 7 days. As organisations have been forced to evolve their operations and adapt to remote working for the long term, we look how Teams measures up to another popular cloud platform, Zoom, and which has superior functionality. Like Teams, the pandemic has created a huge surge of Zoom users as people suddenly find themselves working and learning from home while their workplaces, schools and universities become ghost towns.

What do they both offer?

Microsoft Teams is predominantly a collaboration tool designed to improve internal communication. Zoom has a slightly different offering, as a web conferencing software that facilitates high-performance video and audio conferencing both internally and externally. 

Microsoft Teams has been a popular choice for businesses that use Office 365 products. It is packaged in with the Office 365 suite and therefore it syncs up well with other Microsoft technologies. Zoom is used by companies that are looking for high-quality video conferencing that is easy to set up for both employees and external users.

Some companies make use of both Microsoft Teams and Zoom, mostly using Microsoft Teams for its chat features and its integrations with Office 365, and then Zoom for all their web conferencing.

Platform strengths

Zoom is definitely a leader in the video communications industry, offering unified communications with their cloud platform for video, audio conferencing, collaboration, chat, and webinars across all endpoints. They declare their mission is to enable outstanding experiences for enterprise meetings, chats, and calls for enterprises. The relative ease of the service, which doesn’t require an account or payment to join a video conference, makes it easy to bring in friends and family unfamiliar with the app by just sending them a link.

Microsoft Teams on the other hand, is an all-encompassing workstream collaboration plus unified communications platform; combining meetings, chats, calls, and file sharing with the Office 365 application stack to bring everyone together in a shared workspace.
 
Core differences
 
When it comes to features, both Zoom and Teams enable online meetings, chats, calls, screensharing, and file sharing. The main difference lies in Microsoft’s integration between Teams and its Office 365 stack. This enables Microsoft Teams to truly be a one-stop-shop for many organisations, permitting seamless collaboration, backups, and file search. However, going some way to balance out Microsoft’s Office365 integration, Zoom features a wide-ranging partnership and set of technical integrations.
 
Some users say that being able to use Zoom with little no training or IT support makes it their preference over Teams. But then again, it takes a bit longer to learn how to use it because it has significantly greater functionality.
 
How to pick which platform you need

The choice for an organisation ultimately depends on their needs and requirements. If, as an organisation you already have mature business processes, solid IT Infrastructure and your VPN’s are handling the increased workload from increased remote working, then Zoom may be a viable option. On the other hand, if you are looking to utilise a range of cloud productivity tools for task management, chat, document management and customer engagement, then Teams will provide you with an all encompassing platform and the extended capabilities needed to integrate with the most commonly used third-party tools. There are additional benefits through the M365 product suite that include access to Microsoft SharePoint, Power Automate and Dynamics 365, whereas Zoom cannot offer these capabilities.