probdist

Recently, I've been very frustrated with the quality of teleconferences I've been on. I've had calls in the last year on Skype/MSFT Teams/Webex/Zoom/Bluejeans/Gotomeeting/Various Webinar Products/POTS only conference numbers. Very few went flawlessly.

One thing that always surprises me is how much background noise folks in conference rooms can generate. My office main conference room has a fairly expensive logitech conference phone with multiple satellite microphones and we use zoom for conferencing. The background noise problem is not solved well with this set up.

We encourage everyone not talking to go on mute, but this is difficult for people calling from conference rooms. If i'm in a conference room I will actively manage the muting/unmuting but most folks in meetings seem to not want to be effectively limited to "push to talk" mode.

A challenge is also with third parties from large corporate orgs that can't download plugins or software for calls beyond what they have corporate standardized on. Resulting in people dialed in only and not seeing slides/screenshares.

TLDR: What software/hardware/and business practices do you use for conference calls or telemeetings?