During Zoomtopia, Zoom’s annual company event, many new collaborations and productivity innovations were announced.
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Zoom wants to offer a complete collaboration suite
In a blog post, Zoom announces that its platform will expand into an email and calendar service. Available in beta, Zoom Mail and Calendar will integrate with the unified Zoom One interface offered by the company. This already includes Team Chat, Whiteboard, Phone and Meetings features.
The company thus appears to be betting on a complete productivity solution that competes directly with Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. In addition, the interfaces for Zoom’s mail and calendar services are borrowed from Outlook and Gmail.
The Zoom Mail and Calendar services are aimed at small and medium-sized businesses that want privacy for their emails. The Zoom messaging service will provide end-to-end encrypted emails when messages are sent directly between active Zoom messaging users, and the Zoom calendar service will include a meeting scheduling feature. An easy way for participants to choose an available time to meet, says Joseph Chang, Marketing, Product and Solutions Manager at Zoom.
Another big news, Zoom is introducing Zoom Spots, a tool that facilitates collaboration and spontaneous exchanges in the context of hybrid work. The goal: to encourage employees to meet in a virtual coworking space when they are at a distance. The rollout of this functionality is planned for early 2023.
New functions for meetings on Zoom
Among the other announcements, many new features relate to Zoom Meetings, aiming to compete directly with Microsoft Teams. These new features are:
- Smart records: this feature allows you to create meeting recordings including summaries and breakdowns into chapters.
- Meeting templates: this new feature will allow users to customize and configure different types of meetings. Once created, these templates automatically configure the correct settings for your meetings.
- Avatars: users can choose between animal avatars, human avatars or meta-avatars, i.e. a virtual character that appears on the screen during meetings.
- Video clip: the ability to record videos to share with collaborators to communicate about projects. These videos are stored and centralized on the platform.
Another news to remember: the arrival of a conversation solution powered by AI, Zoom Virtual Agent. This chatbot aims to provide instant and accurate responses to guide customers and solve problems without human intervention initially. This news should be available in 2023.