The University has made the difficult decision to retire our licensed version of Zoom, effective August 2025.
This decision has been reached following a comprehensive review, which highlighted low user engagement with the platform and the substantial cost associated with maintaining the license after 2025. Additionally, Microsoft Teams has demonstrated significantly higher utilisation, managing in a single day the volume of calls that Zoom has processed over the course of six months.
We reached out to staff who have been consistently using zoom over the last 6 month period to ask them to let us know if they have any specific work-related use cases that we need to understand to help them to resolve using another tool. If you use zoom for work-related meetings please get in touch with us by email. Your feedback is essential in ensuring that we identify and address any requirements that may not be fully supported by Microsoft Teams.
Non-work-related meetings
If you are using Zoom for non-work-related meetings you can use the free version of Zoom for 40 minutes at a time, or if you require to have longer meetings you can find out the costs for a personal licence here. Or you may want to look at Google Meet to see if this is something that could be useful for you. To find out the cost of using Google Meet please click here.
There may also be other tools that may be suitable for your non-work-related meetings such as WhatsApp, FaceTime or Facebook Messenger, these however are only suitable for chat, not for sharing presentations.
If you require any further information please email information.centre@stir.ac.uk