Web Conferencing Blog

RHUB issued a statement the other day that the company plans to extend its reach to the UK and Europe by forming a partnership with Collaboration Technologies Ltd in London. For users this means that sales and support for GoMeetNow will be available in the old world now, too.

Just as Citrix intended with the acquisition of Netviewer, RHUB will be very keen on increasing their share of the European web conferencing market. Read the entire statement here.

We at Online Meeting Tools Review focus on testing the software that allows you to conduct meetings online more or less easily. Webinars are one of the meeting types you can handle with web conferencing software (see our distinction between web conference and webinar).

After visiting our site you should have a good idea of which software to go with. How you best conduct a meeting or a webinar is a whole other business. And this is where sites such as killerwebinars.com come in. You pick the platform you wish to use and they can help you with the rest. From preparing to holding a webinar the site offers many useful tips.

The Japanese vendor LiveOn asked us to test their online meeting solution. At the risk of spoiling the suspense: The tool didn’t make it into our ranking.

But let us start at the beginning. The basic functionalities are all there and if we had to choose the scenario this solution is best suited for we’d say it definitely is online meetings planned in advance. Video is the central aspect of the solution, displaying the participant’s webcam streams in the main window. Functionalities such as whiteboard and screen sharing can be added in separate windows.

Now to the shortcomings… The tool runs on Windows only which really is a large restriction as we pointed out earlier – “Mac users are being neglected”. There are neither one-click meetings nor recurring meetings, and you can only enter a meeting room at the time the meeting is scheduled, no earlier. When we started our meeting it took us 8 minutes from clicking “enter room” to actually arriving in the room. Finally, there was no pricing information posted on the website.

User-friendliness and meeting-setup are the two major areas for improvement. The solution shows promise, but currently cannot be considered a serious alternative to the market leaders.

Google is going social. Now it is hard to come up with revolutionary concepts when others like Facebook have brought social networking to near perfection and solutions like Skype make you wonder how video chatting could be any easier. Google+ aims at providing all these services, manageable under one convenient location.

Since we focus on web conferencing we checked how easy it is to conduct meetings online with our Google+ test account. At the moment a Google+ participant can invite you to “hang out”. You will see this invitation posted on your Google+ account only, meaning there are no email invitations currently available.

So we hung out and checked which features Google+ provides. Video is easy and performs well. You also have a text chat option. The YouTube button is a nice touch, but it is still not working properly, i.e. not everyone can see the video – but that most likely has to do with Google still refining its service.

The bottom line for us is: Video, audio, and text chats are there which allow for rudimentary online collaboration. The fact that you need to be a member of the service and logged in to participate is a minus considering that for online meetings you want to have a barrier free experience rather than forcing every participant to open an account before joining a meeting. Screen sharing is what we definitely would expect to be added next. Throw in email notifications and the possibility to schedule meetings and we’re talking. But currently, Google+ really only is a place to hang out. And even with all those features added it just might not be the tool of choice for web conferencing.

Another question rolled in just the other day: “Are there delays in online conferences due to the location of the vendors’ servers? And if so, are there vendors that guarantee quick transfer of data?”

That is a valid question, the scenario being that the host and attendees are all located e.g. in Europe meeting online with a web conferencing solution hosted in the U.S. In that case all data would be routed from Europe to the U.S. and then back again. Even though the data has to travel quite a bit that should not lead to any noticeable delays.

There are days on which an online meeting will be tedious, however, when images just won’t load or there is a lag between picture and voice. This cannot always be blamed on server location but rather has to do with conditions at the attendees’ locations as well as the size of data packages you are sending and receiving. The server’s capacity naturally also plays a role – so a tiny little server next door might perform worse than a high-performance server park on another continent.

Bottom line: If your network is slowed down for whatever reason your online conference will be slow, too, and as long as the servers don’t crash they are not likely to be the cause of slow performance when meeting online. And that also answers the second part of the question: Vendors can only do so much to influence quick data transfer. They cannot guarantee that it will be quick 24x7x365.

Next to giving us feedback on our evaluation and ranking of online meeting solutions our readers approach us with questions that make us go “Waaait a minute. Why is that???” Point in case: Why is nonverbal communication hardly ever considered in web conferencing scenarios?

Let us leave the digital arena and look at good old face-to-face communication – remember that? Now here, obviously, nonverbal communication is essential to guiding understanding. Gestures e.g. can be used to signal approval or to show that you have a question. Even nodding the head carries a message, and don’t get me started on overall body language. So yes, the nonverbal aspect of communication is integral in a face-to-face scenario.

And it partially applies to online meetings, too. If all participants are on webcams that will make it a lot easier to interact than just talking on the phone would. One drawback, however, is that with multiple participants being displayed on your screen you could end up being more confused than informed (see our post on video conferencing).

For webinars nonverbal communication is of marginal help if any. Question marks or a thumbs up – thumbs down signal for the listeners are a gimmick rather than an essential part of communication. During a webinar the silent listeners in most cases have the chance to submit questions to the presenter via chat. These questions are then later discussed in a Q&A session following the presentation. Clicking a question mark button is only an indication of the fact THAT you don’t understand something. You would still have to explain WHAT exactly you don’t understand. And hitting a like or dislike button during e.g. a product presentation doesn’t seem to likely – if you are not a competitor trying to crash the presentation, that is.

So bottom line: Nonverbal communication only plays a minor role in online meetings. The only way of making up for the consequential lack of information that is usually provided by nonverbal signals is to be even more precise in how you phrase things.

There’s a new online meeting tool out there and we were asked to take a look at it. CrunchConnect is a brand new solution and has recently been launched by SalesCrunch. Yes, you guessed it, the focus is on improving the online pitch and sales process.

A first glance at the website – and the video you are greeted with – reveals nothing revolutionary. There are some nice features though, like tracking the attendees’ clicks in your follow-up messages along with the time they spend reading the documentation the presenter sends around. This should give a salesperson a good indication of how interested the participants really are in the product that was presented.

One feature that stands out is the Ice Breaker. CrunchConnect shows every attendant’s local weather, time, and sports news. So while you are waiting for everyone to arrive you can chat and talk away. Now this is naturally not an essential feature and some participants would probably enjoy a bit of silence to work on some emails until the meeting begins…

So, while the CrunchConnect website does make a good first impression this doesn’t mean their web conferencing solution will do the same. The site features easily accessible pricing information and you can test a free version with limited range of functionalities. Seeing that these prerequisites are given we will check out the tool’s performance and post the results in our comparison of online meeting solutions.

By now the commotion around Microsoft’s purchase of Skype has settled a bit and we can ask our standard question: What does this mean for the web conferencing market?

The overall perception of the acquisition is mixed. Some say that it was a brilliant move by Microsoft and it will give Microsoft a huge share of the online collaboration market. Others simply wonder why you would spend so much money for a service that overlaps to large extents with what you are already offering, e.g. with Windows Live Messenger.

We are wondering about a completely different aspect of this deal, which is very intriguing: A little while back it was announced that Skype would be teaming up with Citrix to integrate Citrix’ web conferencing technology into Skype. Now Citrix GoToMeeting is a direct rival of Microsoft’s own online Meeting solution, Microsoft Office Live Meeting.

Currently it is hard to say whether this is a recipe for disaster or for an outstanding web conferencing solution. Either way, we will keep you posted.

There has been a large hype about web conferencing solutions for mobile devices for the last couple of months. And rightfully so. The mobile market – with the iPhone and iPad as forerunners – is growing at an incredible rate so it is mandatory that vendors of online collaboration tools make their solutions available to this growing customer segment.

Now this segment has been rudimentarily covered by the vendors, and the mobile applications – which we have tested extensively – make it possible for attendees on the run to experience an online meeting with the limitations their mobile devices set. So what is the next trend now? HD-video!

All well and good, but with all these new developments there is one thing that vendors keep disregarding. Of course it is nice to have new and flashy features. However, if you only make these available to one set of users and give the rest of us only basic functionalities, something is amiss.

You might have guessed it: We are speaking of the divide between Windows users and Mac users. What web conferencing vendors tend to disregard is that the online meeting market is different from all other software markets in one fundamental aspect: the rule that you need to make sure to cover the requirements of the vast majority (Windows users) before everything else does not apply. And why not? Simply because even though the Mac OS X user group is still small in comparison you do not know with which device an attendee will log into the meeting.

Even if only one attendee logs into the meeting with his Mac and the solution you are using does not support that, you have a problem. Fortunately, the better ranked tools in our comparison all offer some degree of Mac compatibility, which allows for attendance and collaboration in varying degrees. But even GoToMeeting clearly favors Windows users, and hasn’t developed their solution for Mac OS X further in the last years.

In our tool reviews we point at compatibility of the solutions with common Operating Systems. We will be keeping a close look at this issue and if a tool doesn’t show any promise of improving the service for Mac users, we will consider deducting points from the overall score. And no, that is not too harsh. This is a major factor in user friendliness, since a web conferencing host should not have to worry about whether everyone is able to follow him.

On webconferencing-test.com we feature a direct comparison of the top 5 tools, split into our numerous evaluation criteria to offer a direct comparison between the best online meeting solutions on the market. Now, the top 5 additionally each have their own site with all evaluation criteria and detailed explanation of the results displayed at a glance. That means you can decide which focus is more important to you and then study the direct comparison or our detailed analysis.

And we added a feature. We have been testing web conferencing on mobile devices for quite some time now and decided it is time to add our findings to the site. That is why you will now find an additional link in the menu called Tablet & Smartphone support that indicates which mobile devices support web conferencing apps.

In the Web conferencing on mobile devices category of our blog we have posted the findings from several of our tests. When we began our research and analysis of mobile web conferencing apps we initially checked with the vendors to find out who claims to offer the means for mobile online collaboration. After gathering the initial input from the vendors we then tested the apps for ourselves to see if the tools deliver what the vendors promise.

So Ken Molay is a bit off in his Webinar Blog when suggesting that we rely on vendor information alone. But thank you for raising this issue Ken, we certainly could have communicated that more clearly in this case.