Bumped out of virtual meeting as Zoom trials discussed

By Adam Morton

MID Mid Ulster District Council is set to trial Zoom for its virtual meetings with the decision taken during a meeting in which its current video conferencing system, Cisco WebEx, crashed twice.

At present, council deploys a mix of Microsoft Teams, Cisco WebEx and Zoom to run its services.

A paper on the matter complied by council’s IT department describes it as “invaluable tool that works well internally for staff at home and in the office”.

Council purchased Zoom last autumn to facilitate its art and culture events at a cost of £599 for five licences but noted that a subscription to cover all services required by council would require a licence for ten users at a cost of £1,599.

It uses Cisco WebEx to facilitate council meetings at a cost of £1,451 for eight licences and while there were numerous problems at the beginning of virtual proceedings, these have decreased in frequency as time has gone on.

However, in rather comical fashion, as council’s head of IT, Barry O’Hagan was taking members of the committee through the report the system crashed, disconnecting the majority of participants.

“We obviously know and have been become acquainted with WebEx for remote working,” Mr O’Hagan told committee members. “We have been doing that since last year and that has facilitated the fairly reliable now, and I’ll touch wood when I’m saying that, service that has allowed us to stream….”

Kicked out

Just as Mr O’Hagan finished the word “stream”, the service kicked out all but two participants.

The service was restored approximately thirty seconds later with the chair of the committee, Cllr Malachy Quinn joking, “You sort of asked for that one Barry to be fair.”

Noting that he seemed to have “jinxed the whole thing”, Mr O’Hagan started his report again to ensure all members could hear what had been said.

Cllr Phelim Gildernew proposed a trial take place with Zoom noting that he has no problems with Zoom but has had problems with WebEx.

This proposal was seconded by Cllr Dominic Molloy.