Intermedia AnyMeeting Wins PC Mag Pick
Intermedia AnyMeeting wins PC Mag pick for best cloud conference solution. Anymeeting was spun off from Intermedia’s other telecommunications products when demand for a standalone video conferencing software service arose. The result is a stacked service with excellent whiteboard features, automatic transcription, and many useful, dedicated apps. Overall, AnyMeeting is one of the most robust and feature-rich tools we’ve tested. Anymeeting easily earns it our Editors’ Choice nomination for general SMB video conferencing.
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Getting Started With Intermedia AnyMeeting
When you launch the app and log in, you can either immediately start a meeting or schedule one for the future. As the account owner, you are assigned a personalized meeting URL that is always useable for impromptu meetings. This makes it easy to share that URL and avoid recurring meetings confusion. The one downside to this is that if you schedule back-to-back meetings, someone could try to join early and be denied entry if the previous meeting is still in progress.
For everyday use, you want to leverage the add-ons that let you integrate with the calendar features from productivity software, such as Google Workspace, Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and Slack. These make it far easier to invite large groups of people to your video conferences, not to mention integrating AnyMeeting with your current workflows.
Each meeting has two views. The first is Spotlight view, which shows the active speaker in the largest window. Gallery view, on the other hand, displays everyone in the same-size box. For larger meetings, there’s also an Alphabetical view, so you can quickly find someone in the giant sea of faces. Large Video meetings are currently in beta, a feature that lets you see 100 participants on camera.
You can enable or disable the microphone and camera, as well as share your entire screen or a specific app. One of the most unusual features is the ability to mute others, no matter whether or not you are the administrator. This can be turned off if it gets out of hand, but it’s a positive thing for meetings where there’s constant background noise coming from someone. Sometimes it’s easier to just shut them off and notify them via chat.
Screen Sharing and Chat
Much like GoToMeeting, AnyMeeting has annotation capabilities that let you draw on the screen during presentations. In a nice touch, it automatically erases annotations after a specific period to cut down your erasing time.
A whiteboard is included in case you just need a blank area to illustrate something. What’s more, we appreciate that AnyMeeting lets a host share the keyboard and mouse with other participants. Not every video conferencing tool lets you do this; for example, neither ClickMeeting nor Google Meet do.
On the next tab, you have a handy chat screen. We appreciated that chat seemed to be a first-class feature in AnyMeeting, including rich text and emoji capabilities. Other services, such as GoToMeeting, lack these features.
Similarly, on the last tab, there is a fully rich-text-enabled notes screen. Aside from the formatting capabilities, it’s worth noting that all of the notes are automatically emailed to participants at the end of the meeting. This is a great feature for hosts who are constantly harried for notes at a meeting’s conclusion.
AI-Powered Virtual Assistant
We like that Intermedia doesn’t put a cap on the length or quantity of recordings that you can produce. More importantly, the recording feature works in tandem with the Virtual Assistant, if you choose to add it to your meeting.
The Virtual Assistant attempts to intelligently transcribe the meeting. These transcripts aren’t automatically emailed to participants, but they’re made available to the host to edit and redistribute. The results were quite good in testing, but the artificial intelligence (AI) is not perfect, and sometimes you’ll need to add a few corrections here and there.
An additional feature we liked was AnyMeeting’s ability to identify action items during conversations. The AI automatically calls out dates mentioned during the conversation, so you can add them to your calendar. Webex by Cisco, our Editors’ Choice for small to midsize enterprises, has a similar Virtual Assistant, but it can’t replicate that functionality.
Additional Video Conferencing Features
By default, AnyMeeting’s meetings lock after five minutes, but you can manually do this if all your attendees are present and you don’t want anyone else to join. While Zoom bombing may be largely a thing of the past, unauthorized access is still a concern. Intermedia has gone out of its way to address the issue by including the ability to block attendees from meetings URLs until the host lets them enter.
We were also impressed with the Help feature, which we found offered greater assistance than competing services’ similar features. You can play a tutorial, visit a support page, or launch a live chat right in the application to get help when you need it. We found this particularly useful, especially if you’re new to video conferencing and need help resolving some issues.
An All-Around Great Choice for SMBs
Intermedia AnyMeeting’s price is on par with other video conferencing software’s prices, so you can focus on its features to make your decision. In terms of value, AnyMeeting offers more bang for the buck than Webex by Cisco, the Editors’ Choice pick for enterprise video conferencing.
As with any product, though, we had a few minor complaints. One is the lack of breakout rooms. While this tends to be more of a webinar-style feature, it’s increasingly showing up in video conferencing apps, such as BlueJeans, our Editors’ Choice pick for multi-platform conferencing. This feature is especially useful for training sessions, where it’s helpful to break into small groups.
Still, Intermedia AnyMeeting offers a wide range of tools that place it at the top of the video conferencing pack. We’ve long been impressed with its feature set, and revisiting it in 2022 proved no different. AnyMeeting once again wins our Editors’ Choice award for general SMB video conferencing.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Intermedia AnyMeeting is an excellent video conferencing service that has simple controls, good visuals, AI transcriptions, and innovative whiteboard features to enhance your meetings or presentations.
