Zoom takes on Teams at Zootopia
One of the most interesting announcements made by Zoom at their annual Zootopia was introducing what they are calling Zapps.
Zapps are a way of bringing best of breed applications directly into the Zoom desktop client. Zoom has long integrated with the likes of Slack and Asana through adding Zoom functionality to those applications. For example, Zoom’s integration with slack allows users to make Zoom calls directly from a Slack channel.
Zapps, however, work the other way around. With Zapps, Zoom is bringing those other applications into the Zoom desktop experience. According to Zoom:
Zapps help surface all the applications you need to be productive and enable the free flow of information between teams before, during, and after the meeting.
They will allow users to access these other applications without leaving the Zoom client. There are over 25 launch partners for Zapps, including many of the most popular cloud services. You can see them all on the Zapps home page.
For those of us who love Zoom this is a welcome new direction for the company. It also seems like a move to counter Microsoft Teams, with its built-in audio, video, and threaded conversations. Zoom’s chat has always been relatively weak and I think most clients use some other application for those sorts of communications. Now, if Zapps are successful, Zoom users will be able to use Slack, which is much better than Teams or Zoom in my opinion, inside of Zoom.
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