Coronavirus is a pain in the ass—to put it mildly. We’ve seen big cancelations of large group events and conferences, and your employer might be encouraging you to work from home until everything blows over. To help ease this process, Google and Microsoft are stepping up to offer free conferencing tools for a limited time. While it’s a little bit of altruism mixed with a pinch of good PR, free software is free software.
On Google’s side, the company recently announced that it’ll be offering free access to premium features in Hangouts Meet for anyone who uses G Suite or G Suite for Education. Specifically, you’ll get three temporary upgrades:
- Larger meetings, for up to 250 participants per call
- Live streaming for up to 100,000 viewers within a domain
- The ability to record meetings and save them to Google Drive
Your company would normally have to be an Enterprise-level G Suite user to have this many people in a meeting, which would set you (or your company) back $25 per user—each month. If you’re an admin for your organization’s G Suite service, you’ll want to make sure you’ve enabled each of these feature upgrades starting today, if they’ve rolled out to you, as they’re normally disabled by default. You’ll have until July 1 to use them for free, when I presume your meeting limits will revert back to what they once were (rather than Google suddenly spiking your bill).
Read More at https://lifehacker.com/how-to-get-free-conferencing-tools-from-google-and-micr-1842098433
