Perpetual Meeting Rooms With appear.in

We are running a distributed scrum team at work and large source of pain for the team was virtual meetings. It sounds simple in theory, especially if you talk to any of the vendors (esp Webex) but once used in anger we had many many problems. Microphones wouldn’t work, background noise was debilitating, video was poor, connection was poor, confusion around which meeting room we were meeting in and who was setting it up just to name a few.

At the last retro I suggested the idea that we set up a virtual ‘Team Space’. Just like co-located teams have a ‘break out’ or ‘Team space’ that is always free, we could replicate that virtually. At the very least it should help to ease the pain of who would create the room, who was the host and which room were we in. We could just have a ‘Main’ room that everyone could bookmark or shortcut.

The other foreseeable benefits were that the team should have more certainty about the behaviour - for example it should reduce issues with microphones and camera compatibility. Since it was always the same product, these issues should only need to be solved once. Also, fewer barriers to meeting should mean more people meet and test these issues regularly. Half the team uses hangouts which the other half can’t access. So half the team go days or weeks without using the other half’s tech. This always causes issues when we do meet up

Finding a solution

Webex

Webex didn’t have a good option for this. It was very ‘meeting oriented’. Someone had to be the host and set up the room. Also, it required corporate subscription which only half the team had so whenever two people who didn’t have a subscription wanted to talk we had to involve someone else on the team. Very painful to say the least.

Zoom

This has been my tool of choice for a while and I very much like the product and company. I lodged a request to see if this ‘perpetual meeting’ could be set up. Unfortunately, Zoom doesn’t and never will support this feature. No luck here

Hangouts

It doesn’t come out of the box but there’s a good blog by Pivotal showing how they set this up. It basically just required setting up a daily recurring meeting with a Hangout attached. This seemed to be what I wanted on the surface until Hangouts started having weird issues depending on which office/laptop/connection combination was chosen.

Appear.In

Appear.In to the rescue! This is exactly what I wanted. Simple, easy to use and perpetual meeting rooms focused more on the room rather than the meeting. We only just started using this tool last week so it remains to be seen whether it stands the test of time, but it is off to a very promising start.