Many organizations and individuals have relied on Zoom to conduct official and private online meetings. While the company has existed since 2011, the first beta release of Zoom was distributed to the public in 2012. At that time, it could only host 15 participants per conference at maximum.

In 2013, the maximum number of participants increased to 25 persons in the first final version of Zoom. What was amazing was the fact that it only took around one month for the number of users to increase to one million from 400,000 users after the first final version was released. At present, Zoom is widely known as one of the most popular online meeting software.

Features and Highlights

The basic account of Zoom is free. It lets you have online meetings as many as necessary but it comes with a few limitations. Each meeting can only host up to 100 participants and is limited up to 40 minutes only.

Whenever you participate in an online meeting, Zoom can enter full screen mode automatically and always show the meeting controls, as well as the meeting timers, as long as you have enabled the appropriate options. To prevent you from forgetting a meeting, you can configure Zoom to remind you five minutes before the meeting takes place.

Zoom has a graphical interface with a toolbar on top. Its position cannot be moved around. Only the menus within the toolbar can be reordered by dragging and dropping each to left or right. By default the interface uses a light theme but you can change it to a dark one.

Your status in Zoom is set to available all the time. If you don’t want be disturbed by anyone or anything, especially when you’re about to have an important meeting, set it to Do Not Disturb for a period of time like 20 minutes, 1 hour, or even 24 hours.

Immersive View is a part of Zoom features that allows you and every other participant to discuss any topic in a single virtual space. For users who have versions of Zoom that do not support Immersive View, the other participants are displayed in either Gallery View or Speaker View.

Gallery View shows up to 49 participants in a grid layout. When there are more participants, new pages will be created which you can cycle through by using the left and right arrows. On the other hand, Speaker View is the view mode that displays the active speaker in a central frame. The speaker is highlighted in such a way so that every participant can see the participant who is speaking.

Zoom Free Download for Windows

Zoom is an impressive communication tool. It does have its own issues, but plenty of people still use it despite the abundance of alternatives. Whether it is because the company’s marketing strategy or anything else, it doesn’t really matter to most users.

As long as Zoom can meet its users’s expectations, Zoom will likely to always stay ahead of the competition.  Many users won’t bother searching for alternatives when Zoom has already provided everything they need. You can click the link below to download Zoom for Windows: