At minds.ai we make extensive use of various enterprise cloud services to stay in touch with our colleagues across the globe. More specifically, we use Zoom for our teleconference meetings, Slack for our day to day communications and Google Workspace for document and file storage.
Our distributed geography means that it is not always possible for the whole company to attend every meeting. To minimize this issue, we record certain meetings so they can be watched later. These recordings include company update meetings that are relevant for a couple of weeks, and other presentations such as neural network design classes, which stay relevant for years. To make sure that these Zoom recordings are preserved and easily accessible, we developed a tool, the Zoom-drive connector, that automatically manages the storage of any recorded meeting. The connector pulls the recording from Zoom storage, then uploads it to our Google Drive account. The direct link to the recording is then announced on Slack.
The steps to use this tool are documented on our GitHub page. Since we are connecting three different cloud services, some configuration is required to access the APIs. These steps are clearly documented on the aforementioned GitHub page.
This tool can either be built from the source code or run directly via the Docker package. All that is required is a small (virtual) machine capable of running Docker containers. All content stays within your own ecosystem and no data is shared with the outside world. (See Fig. 1 for the steps)
This tool allows you to manage multiple Zoom meetings, and upload the recording of each meeting to a specific, per meeting, Google Drive folder (or shared drive), then send a notification to your chosen Slack channel once it is available. This functionality allows a single instance of the tool to keep track of all relevant recurring meetings. The Slack notification links directly to the recording, allowing easy access for any team members that were unable to attend the live version (see Fig. 2 for an example).
We hope this tool can serve other distributed teams that are working from home (e.g. due to the COVID-19 crisis) or are distributed across many time zones. Easily accessible recordings have helped minds.ai balance our work and personal life when it is not always possible to attend live meetings.
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