Spreed Meeting Review

Spreed web meeting is available free or in a variety of licensed packages. The free edition supports up to three attendees with a maximum meeting length of 90 minutes. The solution is platform-independent and runs under Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

The moderator can grant an attendee moderator privileges at any time. These allow the attendee to import presentations and display his or her screen to other participants.

During our tests we noticed that the Meeting planning functionality is not integrated with the local e-mail client, so the meeting organizer has to maintain a separate address book to invite attendees.

Spreed's video conferencing functionality offers only the basics and is not too user friendly. For starters the single webcams are displayed on the left-hand side from top to bottom in a rather small format. You can select one of the webcams and have it displayed on the full screen, however this covers all the other webcams so that you really only see one contact if choosing this option.

On the positive side, Web meeting attendees can open and share multiple whiteboards and mind maps. Content can be saved locally (pdf or mm format).

Bottom line: Because of the restrictions on meeting duration and number of attendees, the free Web conference solution is not recommended. The licensed edition can be used for online presentations with imported documents and for brainstorming meetings using whiteboards or mind maps, but not for working jointly on documents located on an attendee's local PC.

Pricing

Free of charge for up to three attendees and meetings lasting up to 90 minutes. Various licensed packages (Meeting, Meeting Pro and Events) with staggered pricing according to the maximum number of attendees and the license term

License options

Single user license

Voice over IP and phone costs

VoIP integrated; Meeting Pro: phone conference flatrate with worldwide dial-up numbers