The country is practicing social distancing. Companies have closed down. People are WFH – an acronym that is now rapidly becoming ubiquitous. We confess that it wasn’t too long ago that we had to look it up. Working From Home.

The WFH phenomenon also includes millions of college students who were asked not to return to campus after spring break. We have an intern at JitterWorks who is in this position. Waiting each morning for a link sent by a professor to log on to a Zoom remote classroom session.

Asked about this experience his answer was simple. “It’s just not the same.” He went on to use words like “awkward” and “frustrating” for both the students and the teachers leading the class. One issue he has not experienced is slow, choppy or dropped connections during the classes.

Luckily our intern has a great Internet connection. Otherwise, this could be the perfect scenario for experiencing problems with latency and jitter. (You’ve seen past blogs where we explained the devastating impact unacceptable amounts of jitter can have on Internet phones and video conferencing applications.)

At JitterWorks, we do a lot of remote conferencing. We started with Zoho Meeting, which worked just fine for our needs. Then we considered Microsoft Teams before landing on Google Hangouts – which made the most sense for us when we migrated to Google’s G Suite.

Zoom is one of the most popular cloud-based video conferencing and virtual meeting apps available. And obviously colleges and universities are using it to conduct their classroom sessions remotely. But it’s not without its problems. There can be security issues with publicly shared Zoom links. Especially among people who join a video conference with less than honorable intentions.

Zoom offers the opportunity to screen share among participants. This makes perfect sense in the scope of a remote conference or team meeting. However, the use of public links allows anyone to join the conversation and “screen share” things like pornography. Apparently this has been happening often enough that there is a term for it. Zoombombing. With the perpetrators being labeled Zoombombers.

Zoombombers have even figured out a way to gain entrance to privately shared Zoom links – like the ones provided by our Intern’s professors. It’s a problem. But Zoom provides ways to safeguard against these nefarious activities and we strongly suggest to anyone using Zoom – especially in a classroom setting –  that they implement these safeguards.

With the unprecedented rise in WFH at both the corporate and academic levels, products like Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Hangouts are essential. Do your homework, pick the tool that is best suited for your needs and pay close attention to the guidelines you need to implement to keep your students and employees safe from Zoombombers and the other trolls who wish to disrupt your meetings and classes.