How many times in a given day do you chat with a coworker who is in a different office, or even a different time zone? For many of us, this is a facet of everyday life at Weill Cornell Medicine. Our institution does vital work at outposts all over the city, state, and globe, and we know that a high-performance video conferencing solution is crucial to bridge the distance between colleagues. In collaboration with our Ithaca colleagues at CIT, ITS is pleased to announce Zoom as our new free online video tool.
Zoom is a modern online web, video, and teleconferencing platform that’s used in peer institutions, like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Notre Dame. Using it is easy - anyone can attend a Zoom meeting by simply clicking the link in their meeting invite. Faculty and staff can host a Zoom meeting just by setting up an account. Simply sign into https://weillcornell.zoom.us with your CWID and password. The best part? It's free for WCM faculty and staff.
You can find more instructions on getting started with Zoom on the ITS website, including how to download desktop and mobile applications and Outlook plug-ins, and how to perform basic Zoom tasks. If you have a more specific question, go straight to the source and check out Zoom’s support page. Zoom offers free weekly training webinars, covering multiple topics. Learn more at https://zoom.us/livetraining.
Why Zoom?
Zoom was selected after extensive evaluations by a Cornell campus steering committee formed in 2015, which included representatives from all colleges and campuses, including Weill Cornell Medicine and Cornell Tech. The steering committee solicited university-wide use cases and evaluated market-leading products, ultimately ranking Zoom as the clear winner. The tool received top ratings from pilot participants for ease of use, audio and video quality, and enhanced instant messaging, screen sharing, and whiteboard functions. It also received high ratings for installation simplicity, connection stability, and feature consistency across Windows, Apple, and Android devices.
Does Zoom offer the same features as WebEx?
Zoom offers many of the same benefits as our previous video conferencing tools, WebEx and Skype for Business. Zoom lets you hold meetings of up to 100 participants; a limited number of licenses is available by request for larger meetings of up to 300 participants, or webinars for 100 or 500 attendees. You can also share you screen, share an application (like PowerPoint), pass the presenter reins to another participant, and more. Zoom is also HIPAA-compliant, and has signed the HIPAA Business Associate Agreement (BAA) for healthcare customers like WCM. This means Zoom is responsible for keeping patient information secure and reporting security breaches involving personal healthcare information. Zoom protects and encrypts all audio, video, and screen sharing data.
WebEx has been officially retired, but if you have any concerns about making the transition, please email its-training@med.cornell.edu for a demonstration. We will continue to support Skype for Business, but recommend Zoom larger groups. Skype is ideal for a quick conversation online with a colleague, and meetings of fewer than 20 participants.