May 22, 2019 / in Business Recommendations, How To / by Jason Terry
One of the things you know I love to do is share great resources… especially if they are free. Some of the past resources I’ve shared are royalty free music for videos, royalty free images for your website and blogs, and more.
This week I wanted to share one of my favorite web based applications called FreeConferenceCall.com.
FreeConferenceCall.com (FCC) is truly free. You don’t have to provide a credit card to set up an account, and a lot of great functionality is included in the free version of their system.
I use FCC with clients when I want to show them something and they need to be able to see my screen. This is especially helpful when they are home sick or are in another state.
There are tools for marking up and calling attention to specific areas on documents and applications during the screen share, and you can pass control of the screen at any time. (This doesn’t mean they can share their screen… but they can control your screen during the screen share. Cool!)
Would you believe that FCC supports up to 1,000 in a video conference call for free? That’s crazy, but it’s true. You can see the active speaker in the main window, just like other video conferencing systems. And you can scroll to see other video feeds of the participants.
You can record and archive the video conference, but you only get 1GB of free storage with the free account. If you need to record more, additional storage plans start at $3/month… so it won’t break the bank. (A feature I have not tried to use is their automatic transcription of recorded videos. That might be awesome if you needed that feature.)
During a conference call, you can chat with any participant. This is great if you want to have people ask questions for you to cover during the call, but not disrupt the flow of the call. I really like this feature.
I don’t use this feature… but if you were in some kind of support role, you could do a video conference call with a customer and take control of their desktop to review application settings, provide technical support, guide them through training, etc.
There are tons of other great features in the free version. You can download a plugin for Outlook and Google Calendar that makes it easy to invite people to a video conference call that will happen at a future date. There is a mobile app and you can host conference calls from your phone. FCC integrates with Slack, Evernote and Dropbox for easy document sharing and collaboration.
You can go here for a complete list of features!
I hope you’ll let me know if you try it out. And if there is something I could cover for you in a future story, let me know in the comments, email or give me a call. It’s always good to catch up.