The current Covid19 crisis has significantly impacted the way we engage and connect with each other not only from a personal point of view, but also from a business and civic perspective. Government, not-for-profits, institutions and private business are being forced to quickly adapt to a new reality and find new ways to engage with their audience online.

In response, we have introduced a new tool to The HiVE that helps you have conversations and broadcast information in real time via Zoom, the leading video conferencing software on the market.

In addition we have made an important improvement to our Conversation tool that will facilitate more real-time discussions on the platform, so it can be used to fill gaps in your organisation while face-to-face meetings are unviable.

New Zoom tool

A new tool that allows you to integrate with Zoom will be introduced that lets you embed Zoom meetings directly on a webpage in The HiVE. Zoom is a leading online web meeting platform that allows you to video conference with groups of people in real-time. It can be used to hold virtual meetings with your audience, and facilitate the broadcasting of events.

What's great about this integration is that users won't need to download or install the Zoom application, they can simply join and view the meeting by visiting your website. The integration uses the Zoom web client which is still in development, so it is important to note that it may not yet work in all web browsers and may present other issues.

The Zoom tool will be available for Premium subscribers in the long term. However, we will be making this tool available to all subscription levels in the short to medium term to help you better respond to the current situation.

You may have read about the potential security issues associated with the Zoom product as it has been a hot topic, especially in government organizations. However, what you may have not heard is that the company has made significant commitments to address its security issues, and has already delivered on many of these.

Because of these rapid improvements and the fact that Zoom has skyrocketed to being the most widely used web conferencing platform for business, we have decided to pursue this integration to meet the increased demand for these services.

Zoom is a paid service and will require a separate subscription to get access to all its features. However, a free, limited plan is available.

Some issues may exist in this integration. Therefore, we are requiring you to read and sign a waiver in order to access this tool. This is to ensure you explicitly understand the potential issues and limitations this tool provides, as we may not be able to meet some of the aspects we agreed with you as part of our Terms of Service.

Most of the tools in The HiVE have been designed for people to use at a time that is convenient to them. This usually means hopping on at any time over a long period of weeks or even months.

However, within the context of the current crises, many people are looking to engage in a way that more closely mirrors the 'real-time' feel of face-to-face engagement.

While our tools of capable in working in these situations to some degree, a better user experience is possible. For example, comments and content does not automatically refresh with new content is posted unless the user re-loads the page.

In normal situations this is not a problem, but if you are facilitating real-time events this can present some issues.

In response to this demand, we have introduced improvements to the Conversation tool that will notify users who are viewing the page when new comments have arrived. This will facilitate more real-time discussions to happen online.

Users will be notified when new comments are made in the conversation thread by a green 'badge' at the top of the tool. Clicking this will then load in the new comments, meaning the user won't have to manually reload the page to see the new content.

This feature must be enabled in the Conversation Settings, by navigating to Activity in the block settings and selecting Real time comments 'on'.

It is important to note that this tool is not 'instant messaging' and new comments won't appear the very second they are posted. There will still be a delay of 2-4 minutes when the feature is enabled before users are notified of new comments. This makes sure our servers aren't overloaded by searching for new comments too often.

Did you know that you can already integrate YouTube live using The HiVE's Video tool? YouTube live allows you to livestream events directly from your YouTube account and broadcast meetings or events that may be happening.

To help you with setting this up, we've added a new tutorial on the Learning Centre that provides you with step by step instructions for setting this up.