The webconference is being touted as the answer to meeting in a carbon-emissions-conscious and gasoline price terrified society. There are a million options out there. Which one is the best?
Impossible question to answer. It depends so heavily on what your requirements are. What are you hoping to achieve? How much functionality do you want, and how important is simplicity or intuitive use to you?
I’d suggest starting with Skype to see what it can do for you at little or no cost, then move on from there. I've just been turned on to Dimdim. It's free for webconferences up to 20, and upgrading from there is also reasonable. My favourite part is that that it's simple and requires no downloads of administrator or participant.
Adobe Connect is a pretty complete option, and enables multiple users to edit documents shared in a “meeting room”. Sexier still would be a ProtoSphere virtual world, where work can be conducted and documents edited, but there’s the novelty of avitars, virtual spaces, and if you like; virtual 3D constructs of physical items you would like to display or manipulate with your conferees. There’s also a lot of support for Learning Management Systems. Of course, there’s also a lot of price tag associated.
A few things to consider that you may or may not be looking for when you check out these and other options:
· Ability for participants to edit documents (not just view them)
· Ability for participants to upload or share documents (not exclusively an administrator function)
· Polling function
· Chat
· Whiteboard
· Ease of connecting – do a participant need to follow a link and enter a code, or do they need to login, register, download applications, etc
In the spirit of being an honest broker, here are a few other options that I've experienced as a user or arbitrarily found in the simplest of Google searches. They range from enterprise solutions to basic user products:
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1 comment:
Andrew,
My name is Robert O'Neill and I work for Glance Networks. We produce an incredibly simple, dependable, and easy to use webconferencing and screensharing tool called Glance, and in light of your post, I thought you'd be interested in checking us out. We strive incredibly hard to make Glance as simple as possible, and one of our favorite and most common compliments that we receive is that Glance "just works". You can host up to 100 users on any combination of Linux machines, Macs, and PCs, and host from either a Mac or PC. We're offering a special deal to bloggers like yourself currently as well; if you go to www.glance.net, sign up for the free week trial, and then email me with your username (whatever.glance.net) I'll add another 51 weeks to the trial to make it one full year of Glance for free.
Definitely check us out and if you have any questions or concerns just email me at bobby@glance.net. Hope to talk to you soon!
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