For Office 365 customers, we recommend Microsoft Teams for conference calls. It's available for iOS, Android, PC, Mac, and Linux as well as pretty much any web browser on your computer, so it's pretty universal.
Anybody (paid or not) can use the chat feature, and paid Office 365 accounts (Essentials, Business, Business Premium, or E3) can create video conferences.
To use Microsoft Teams:
- Ask Pinnacle to deploy the Teams app to your corporate Windows machines
- For any personal machines or Macs - https://teams.microsoft.com/downloads
- For iPhone/Android - download the Teams app from the App Store
- To use from a web browser, just click https://teams.microsoft.com/
NOTE: When logging in, be sure to choose "Work Account", then login with your work email address and password
To start a conference, click Calendar, and create a "New Meeting". Then you can invite the people you'd like, and it will send them an email.
Here's how it works:
- Participants will likely need to allow microphone and camera access the first time they connect. Please ALLOW this access to the application, even if you intend to mute your audio or video once you get into this particular meeting, because this is a permanent setting for this site/application.
- Participants clicking the link on a smartphone will be directed to download the Teams app for a better user experience.
A few recommendations:
- Use a laptop when possible, so you've got the largest screen available to see people.
- Use a telephone handset, a headset (preferably with a "boom" microphone that is near your mouth) or a specific conference room microphone for your audio. Laptop mics and regular telephone speakerphones are notoriously terrible about picking up other noise and creating feedback. See https://support.pintechfw.com/en/support/solutions/articles/4000155535-why-buy-an-external-headset-
- Avoid using the telephone dial-in numbers. They will have much poorer sound quality than using the app or the web browser.