By David Duffett, Worldwide Community Advocate

The Current Crop

Video collaboration tools are getting more use than ever before, and this sudden hike in use is giving rise to three useful tests on the current range of offerings:

1. Do they provide the functionality required?
2. Are they easy to use?
3. Do they scale well, when the load increases by an order of magnitude, or two?

Would it surprise you to learn that all of these factors are under your control when you develop your solution on SignalWire?

Functionality

Well beyond basic one to one, or one to many video interactions, users are looking for features that make working from anywhere easier. With SignalWire, you have the ability to have a number of conference rooms (or virtual offices) running concurrently, and your team members can see who is in which room so that they can "knock" on these offices and join in. 

It’s just like walking around an IRL office and seeing who is in each meeting room - maybe you have called a meeting, or been invited to one, or maybe you just want to get a flavor of who is hanging out with who. All in all, having a place to see an overview of all virtual office spaces is a very useful feature.

To further replicate face-to-face scenarios, supervisors are able to move people from one conference room to another to have impromptu brainstorming sessions and meetings. That way, nobody gets left out of the loop! 

Even ‘water cooler’ talk is possible when working in a virtual office. People can jump into an office and leave the call running in the background so that when people join in you can bring it the foreground and catch up with your coworkers!

You can also easily drop in photos and video clips which is perfect for giving presentations as well as sharing your favorite memes with the team. 

Ease of Use

Despite how far the communications industry has come, many companies are still using antiquated applications that need to be installed and are bogged down with the administrative work of keeping them up to date and secure. Thanks to WebRTC, you can have voice, video, and screen sharing right in your browser without the need for plug-ins of any kind.

With our full implementation of WebRTC, SignalWire facilitates ‘clientless’ use of all the functionality you create!

Well, that’s a slight lie… There is a client - it’s your browser, but you already have it, and you don’t need to install anything else ;-)

This not only makes things simpler for you, but it's also easier to meet with people outside of your team - all you need is a link!

Scaling for Mass Use

The world is being encouraged to work from home through the novel coronavirus and it is becoming clear that legacy communications tools are not equipped to handle the steep increase in load. 

Mobile networks to broadband connections to collaboration applications have all groaned under the new load they have recently experienced - resulting in temporary outages, poor quality user experiences and hasty upgrades to underlying infrastructure.

Many a developer has created an amazing solution that works perfectly on a single server or small cluster, only to find a huge load of near impossible work in re-architecting that solution to deal with mass use - like keeping track of the state of various interactions and federating that information to all the services concerned.

When you build your communications and collaboration solutions on SignalWire, we take care of the scaling on our Global Elastic Infrastructure - thus removing one of the major headaches of ‘real-world’ deployment. With SignalWire, you can concentrate on building the fantastic functionality you have in mind.

What are you waiting for? Sign up for a space to try it out yourself, and talk to us on our Slack Channel, we can answer any question you have for us! You can learn more about our disruptive pricing here.