Zoom goes boom, Teams tears at seams: Technology stumbles at the first hurdle for this homeworking malarkey They knew it was coming and have been desperately building capacity – yet the flood of workers to video conferencing software has proved too much for companies like Zoom and Microsoft. This morning, with millions of Americans joining the global trend toward social distancing and working from home amid the coronavirus pandemic …
A friend called in this afternoon and reported his Boss (high-tech dimwit that he is) had pr0n playing in the background ... with the second monitor in clear view. Why did he call? He wanted to know how to get a screen capture of the proceedings, preferably with video and audio.
Which reminds me ... Do all your corporate lawyers understand that everything discussed using such software can easily be captured for future reference? And after letting them know this, did they OK the concept of remote working for the masses?
I was asked to help a neighbor get setup to work from home this weekend to handle the corporate billing and payments, she had a load of questions they wanted answered so I sat down at her laptop and logged in ... into Windows Vista Business Edition.
We discussed it and she went off to buy a new laptop.
You'd think that videoconferencing or other collaborative activities would only be limited by the capacity of the network. But there's no way to easily monetize point to point communication so we've gone from the solutions we used literally 20 years ago to a centralized model. That model works OK until the server(s) buckle.
Just about everything requires interacting with a remote site these days, if nothing else to verify that your license is up to date. This introduces a significant lag in startup times and even while trying to use that software. Truly a case of progress going backwards....no wonder that we find that more and more of the machinery of our lives is just plain not working properly.
"the solutions we used literally 20 years ago"
Try 35 years ago. N.E.T. was selling video conferencing, collaborative stuff like whiteboarding, and etc. capability in the mid 1980s. They worked quite well ... better over leased T1 (T3) lines, to be sure, but they worked just fine over The Internet, assuming a large enough pipe to "the backbone" (whatever THAT was). I don't ever remember having any issues[0] with it in the several years that I used it ...
How far we've come in a third of a century. Still like your Cloud?
[0] To be fair, the whiteboard was kinda flaky, but that was hardware issues (pilot build), not software or networking.
Don't get me wrong here, I'm all for decentralised and wish Skype-of-olde was still a thing, but the problem with decentralised is when the call is more than 1:1. Who is then responsible for the extra bandwidth? Do you want to send your HD video and audio streams to all four of the other participants in the meeting (meaning your 2mbps upload is now 8mbps upload), The way Skype used to do it is that whoever was first in the call would shoulder the burden, so participants #2, #3 and #4 would only need to send their video to #1, and then #1 would re-broadcast it to the rest. That detail was never publicised, but meant you had to be careful who "started" the call
"Who is then responsible for the extra bandwidth?"
We're discussing working from home. Keyword "working". Bounce it all off the corporate servers, that's part of what they are there for.
Note that this kind of thing requires rather small values of "server", at least in most reasonable corporate cases.
I noticed that Slack spun up over 300 new media endpoints (call servers) in various EC2 regions, just during this last weekend. One of the advantages of having a cloud infrastructure stack I guess. Capacity seems to be up 300% since December.
Anyone know what that would do to your AWS bill?
The company I work for uses both TEAMs and S4B. They have worked flawlessly since the COVID-19 pandemic caused the management to instruct us all to work from home. I speak with customers, who also use TEAMS or S4B and we have not experienced any of the outages being reported on.
Teams has worked ... well, as well as it usually does (decent audio, reasonable video and screen sharing, abominable user interface) for me the past few days.
(May I just say I'm fascinated that you managed to write "Teams" in three different nonstandard ways there, without ever getting it right. "TEAMs" might be my favorite, as it's arguably the most puzzling and annoying.)
One positive (sorry, not really the right word but you know what I mean) about the current situation is how much people are realising that all along, meetings can be handled via email or vdo conf (when working) and just how much work can be successfully done from home after all, for the right type of business.
When this blows over (economic devastation notwithstanding) it could be fun having the boss convince you that you need to physically come in.
Meanwhile, stay safe everybody with your own level of what 'safe' means.
Always wear at least a coat during your calls ----->
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