5 Business Tech Tools for Online Meetings You Need to Try Today

Meetings are a crucial component of any organization’s business activities. Whether you need to conduct important information to your employees, plan the launch of a new product, or convince your potential clients to work with you — successful meetings lead to successful businesses. 

By HEIDI ROSENBERG

In the past two years, online meetings have seen a tremendous rise in their popularity due to COVID-19 lockdowns. While companies were shut down due to the pandemic, they resided in conducting meetings online — and the process turned out to be pretty good, thanks to the modern tech tools available today. 

If we had faced the pandemic for a decade, the face of companies might have been completely different today, as there were not a lot of seamless options for communicating and collaborating online at that time. 

In this article, we talk about 5 of those modern tech tools that make meetings-over-internet much easier and faster. 

Let’s dive in. 

Zoom

Let’s kickstart the list with the most obvious business communication tool: Zoom. There’s a good chance you might have heard its name during the pandemic, even if you weren’t aware of it before the virus happened. 

Zoom skyrocketed the popularity charts when businesses, schools, and universities all relied on Zoom to conduct online meetings, presentations, and webinars. 

Zoom can be installed on any modern computer, i.e., Windows PC, Mac, iPhones, or Android devices — and works in a cross-platform fashion. That means you can converse with people on Zoom even if they have installed it on a different kind of computer. 

Microsoft Teams

 Microsoft Teams is another modern online communication tool. When it comes to conducting online meetings, it works just like Zoom. 

However, Teams have a key advantage. Being a Microsoft service, it’s seamlessly integrated into other services from the tech giant. For instance, your Outlook contacts sync to your Teams, too. And that’s only one scenario; Teams sync with almost all of the Microsoft services there are. 

Furthermore, Microsoft Teams is a built-in feature in the new operating system by Microsoft, the Windows 11. That means you don’t even have to install Teams to use it now, it’s baked into your PC’s taskbar for instant access. 

Google Meet

Another one of the popular video conferencing services is Google Meet. It works like the two services mentioned above, but this one relies on Google’s infrastructure to connect. Where Microsoft Teams syncs between your MS products, Meet syncs between your Google products. 

That means your Google Calendar events, your Google Contacts, your Keep Notes, will all be available when you need them. Furthermore, Google has introduced a new handy feature where you can present a document or slide, directly from the corresponding app to a meeting. 

For instance, let’s say you’re working on a Google Docs document that you need to present to a meeting. When in the editor, you will see the “Present to a meeting” option on the top right. Clicking on it, you can present the document in the meeting without even leaving the screen.

The best part is, your scheduled meetings automatically appear in the “Present to a meeting” option when you click on it. That’s because Google’s services are interlinked and this feature fetches your meetings from the Calendar. 

Remote interpreting platforms

This one is not a tool to be exact, but a tool category. You see, modern workplaces have employees from different native and cultural backgrounds. To conduct your meeting information to everybody in the best way possible, you will need to translate the content into multiple languages. And that’s where a remote interpreter comes into play. 

By using video remote interpreting, you can seamlessly interpret your meeting content so everyone can hear and understand it better. 

The bottom line

Conducting online meetings is easier than ever in 2021, thanks to the tons of tools and services available in the market today. This article sets you up with some of the most popular of those tools. Using these, you can ensure your meetings are seamless, more productive, and efficient.