Web Conferencing Blog

Voxwire is a basically good online conferencing solution. The user interface is very well-structured and all the basic functionalities are included. But during our tests we were disappointed. And here is why:

• If you want to activate application sharing you have to install a software, which is a common practice. However, Voxwire demands that you close your browser after the installation, which means you have to leave the meeting and reenter again.
• File sharing is not as easy as it sounds since the tool makes it hard for you find and understand the function.
• After all our testing we still don’t know how a meeting can be ended. You can close your browser window, but the meeting continues.

Even though Voxwire shows a lot of promise the online collaboration tool seems reluctant to reveal its functionalities. The basis is good though, and we believe that the next version could greatly improve with some minor changes.

Read the whole evaluation.

We took another look at Meeting Efficiency, even though it is not in our testing focus in that it is no web conferencing solution. This time we sat through an entire day of training to really learn every aspect of the tool. Now, why do we even bother?

Well, we value software that actually helps users accomplish something, be it organizing a conference spread over continents or “simply” organizing a meeting as such. Anybody who has ever faced this task will know that it is hard work. What do we need to discuss? Where should we start? How do we prioritize the single issues? Who will take care of the protocol? How do the meeting attendees get access to the protocol? That is enough to make an overworked secretary jump out the window…

Meetings are hard work and require a lot of thought from those who plan them. And this is where Meeting Efficiency comes in because all that thought has already been included in the software. Meeting Efficiency is not a tool to organize documents and create timetables, but rather helps you define goals, shift priorities during the meeting, and create a protocol while you are discussing.

Meeting Efficiency divides a meeting into four phases:

1)    Preparation
2)    The meeting itself
3)    Documentation
4)    Communication

For every phase the software offers tools that actually lead the user towards reaching a concrete goal. And since Meeting Efficiency allows users to enter information while the meeting is in progress, the protocol pretty much takes care of itself. As a bonus the software will create diagrams and presentations so that the attendees will get the results in a visually appealing form.

But the software is not only of benefit to meeting host. Every participant will get more out of a meeting. When it comes to web conferencing, Meeting Efficiency will help create more concrete results for all participants since the information is structured very clearly and the diagrams and status screens are intuitive. So whenever the host shows his screen the participants can easily see at what stage of the meeting they are, what will be discussed next, and what priority the upcoming topic has.

Meeting Efficiency is no web-application but rather has to be installed on the meeting host’s own computer. But with a good web conferencing solution that at least offers screen sharing the information will be available to everyone.

With it’s Magic Quadrant for web conferencing Gartner offers a comprehensive study of the web conferencing market which includes a detailed evaluation of online collaboration tools. Now we have been approached with a justifiable question: Why do their results differ from ours?

The answer lies within another question: What are you looking for in a web conferencing solution? Which brings us to the criteria of evaluation. Gartner takes a very close look not only at the software itself but also includes the vendor in its evaluation. Overall viability of the vendor e.g. has high priority. Here Gartner assesses the financial health of the provider and the placement of the web conferencing tool in question within the organization’s product portfolio. The marketing strategy of the vendor is also ranked high priority.
This prioritization naturally favors the big players who have the high marketing budgets and are financially better situated than a small vendor who just introduced his 1.0 version to the market.

We have a different focus when analyzing and evaluating web conferencing solutions. The web conferencing solutions we evaluate should e.g. offer an approach different or complementary to what Gartner calls the on-premises-model. Users should not be required to install additional hardware or software to their IT-infrastructure to run an online collaboration solution. We give vendors a higher ranking if they enable you to run the software without great preparatory effort (SaaS – Software as a Service). This is important to us since we test with small to medium businesses in mind, who often cannot afford the costly and time consuming installation. You can find a detailed description of our testing approach and evaluation criteria here.

Gartner also features tools that are not included in our ranking. Most of these tools have been rejected by us previously because they did not comply with our basic requirements, e.g. offering a free test version and pricing information. We will definitely take another look at AT&T Connect, Intercall Unified Meeting, and PGi Netspoke to see if they can be included in our ranking now.

If you know of other tools that we have not tested so far and you feel fit all our criteria for evaluation please let us know. We will definitely have a look at the suggestions.

The web conferencing solution sococo is still being completed and has yet to be released as version 1.0. However, it can already be downloaded free of charge.

So, what does this software do? Well, not quite what we are looking for in an online collaboration tool, the main restriction being that it can only be used for collaboration within an organization.

Still it has some very neat features and we like the approach. You can create virtual offices and meeting rooms and see on a map of that virtual office who is currently in a meeting with whom. There is a chat functionality and screen sharing is also possible. The user interface is very straight forward, which means great ease of use.

Because of the exclusively internal usage scenario we will not evaluate the software in detail. If you want to find out more you can go to the vendor’s website and have a look at the how-to videos or download the free version and just try it out yourself.

Making a meeting effective is quite a task: Who needs to attend? What is the agenda? Is there even an agenda? There is some effort involved in a meeting before it actually begins.

This effort is increased when it comes to online meetings. When you remove the meeting from a physical space you loose many ways of interaction. You get no feedback on the other attendees’ body language. And, let’s face it, the other attendees might just be checking their email while you lead the discussion. As you can see, the planning of an online meeting or any face-to-face meeting needs to be given a lot of thought.

So we did just that. We sat down and thought about how to best plan a meeting ahead. Well, to be honest, we were shown how to do this. We sat through a presentation of the software “Meeting Efficiency“ which was developed by the Parmenides Foundation. And we were impressed. Although the tool offers a ton of features and functionalities we could instantly follow the workflow involved.

“Meeting Efficiency” can be a valuable aid in organizing and structuring meetings. If you want more than simply a mind mapping tool to assist you, you can check out the Parmedines Meeting Efficiency website.

No time to lean back and take a breather! With 30+ tools we do offer a very broad overview of the web conferencing market. However, there are many new solutions being pushed on the market and those tools that we already tested need a lot of re-evaluation to keep you up to date on upgrades and enhancements.

So we will sure be keeping busy and have some new evaluations and upgrades for you soon. To our list of evaluated tools.

We have now included information on affiliate programs in our ranking. Our motive behind this is simple: We want to make the web conferencing market as transparent as possible, and one key feature of transparency is to see who is connected to whom in what way.

And yes – you guessed it – our overview is far from being complete. Our powers are limited and we have to find our way through all the offers and vendors out there to come upon connections that are not always visible at first glance. That is why we are glad for every hint you can give us.

Now what exactly do the third-party suppliers offer? In most cases you will find that the offered solution is an older version of a specific web conferencing solution or a version with limited functionality. And the point of using such a partner version of an online conferencing tool is …? Well, lets just say you are a customer of a telecommunications provider listed in our ranking. Then you can simply integrate the offered web conferencing package into your already existing service bundle with the vendor in question.

You can find all the current affiliate information here. Just click on the “Partners” links on the right-hand side.

Microsoft NetMeeting is by far the oldest product we feature in our ranking: It was originally distributed together with Windows 95. NetMeeting also is the only web conferencing solution in our ranking that is not being further developed and for which there is no support.

We still tested it and included it in our overview for various good reasons. For many business-users “web conferences” and “NetMeeting” are synonymous, which shows what natural and exclusive usage this simple Microsoft tool continues to get – for internal online meetings that is. And NetMeeting’s time is nowhere near to being over.

A manager of one of the leading Cisco distributors recently gave us an interesting insight into how collaboration tools are actually being used. For “big” online meetings connecting multiple locations, personnel reserve meeting rooms in which they gather for the meeting and make use of the pre-installed video conferencing solution Cisco Telepresence. Since for every instance a large internal cost is accrued this solution is not the most popular. This is also due to the fact that staff must prove that using this solution leads to less travel cost. For the occasional online conference with external attendees, distributors most regularly use Cisco WebEx Meeting Center. For internal virtual gatherings regarding daily business the number-one solution is NetMeeting – for the simple reason that “NetMeetings” are easy to start.

So if even organizations that have the most up-to-date web conferencing tools in place still make use of good old NetMeeting that means for us:

NetMeeting obviously is far outdated, which means that usually we wouldn’t consider it for evaluation. But since millions of business-users are not aware of any solution other than NetMeeting, we want to at least show the difference between this early software and the current, far superior solutions for web conferencing.

Our tool-reviews for InstantPresenter and MegaMeeting are the last in our list of now altogether 31 evaluations. We currently are not planning to include any further tools. Now, does that mean that we have actually given you a comprehensive overview of the online meeting market? Well, yes and no.

The market for online conferencing solutions is a very dynamic one with new vendors popping up constantly and existing solutions being expanded, upgraded, or bought and integrated into other solutions. So an overview of this market can never be all-including. What also makes our life as evaluators difficult is the fact that there really hardly are clear distinctions between the web conferencing market and solutions for remote support, webinars, video conferencing, and e-learning to name just a few.

Yet, if we look at what we define as web conferencing solutions for professional usage with focus on desktop sharing functionality, we can say that our list of tools gives you exhaustive coverage of all tools worthy of notice. More precisely: There are no further tools out there with realistic chances of making it into our top 15. That is why we deliberately will forbear from further detailed testing and rather concentrate our efforts on keeping the information on our site up to date.

We have a backlist of web conferencing tools that we have scanned briefly and decided not to test extensively. Tools on that list are e.g. CrossLoop, GatherPlace, WiredRed, WebMeetLive, Voxwire, Yuuguu, NTRmeeting, and almost Meet. As our brief tests have shown, these tools are in need of further improvement before we can consider them for extensive testing.

And that means we actually are done – for now. If you are looking for a good online conferencing solution you can be assured that our ranking represents the best tools that are available at the moment.

Well ok, we are not perfect. So if we should have missed a solution for web conferencing by some odd chance let us know. We will check it out.

Search the German Wikipedia site for “Webinar” and you will get an article explaining among other things that the word is a composite of “Web” and “Seminar”. Search the English site for “Webinar” and you will be redirected to an article on “web conferencing” whereas the German site offers an additional article on web conferencing next to webinars. So obviously the English version of Wikipedia treats “webinar” and “web conference” as synonyms in contrast to the German version. Since Wikipedia is claimed to reflect the knowledge of the masses it is pretty safe to assume that there exists some confusion regarding the web conferencing terminology.

Agreed, there is no clear-cut distinction, but since we evaluate web conferencing solutions on webconferencing-test.com we feel that the basic terms and criteria must be defined, so that we can begin with an impartial set of distinctions when testing software. So here’s how we use the terms:

A web conference typically is a non-public online meeting with focus on collaboration. One person is the formal host, but the role of presenter can easily be switched along with keyboard and mouse control. Desktop sharing is the preferred mode for collaboration since it allows for easy exchange of information, access to various tools, and editing of files. Attendees are invited individually by the meeting host – a good software offers an invitation functionality. Other, more asymmetric forms of online meetings can also be regarded as web conferences, when e.g. a presentation is held in a rather informal setting, with few attendees who can give feedback at any time.

In a webinar the roles of presenter/moderator on the one side and attendee/listener on the other side are fixed. The attendees are invited individually by the presenter and are passive viewers/listeners throughout the entire webinar. Possible forms of giving feedback are polls, a chat function, and  question rounds that can be initiated by the moderator only. An open registration to webinars is also possible. Important functionalities are reporting – who has attended? – and archiving of the entire webinar so that it can later be published on a website or sent to the attendees.

On webconferencing-test.com we focus on software for actual web conferences and point out tools that can also be used for webinars. For more in-depth knowledge and additional infos on webinars you can visit Ken Molay’s Blog.

This leaves us with webcasts as our final term, which are another subcategory of online meetings. In general, a webcast is a live or recorded event that targets a large audience. There are no interactive elements offered at all and attendees can often participate without registering. Multimedia elements – especially video – are featured heavily in webcasts.

So, this is how we differentiate between web conferences, webinars, and webcasts. Please feel free to comment if you disagree or if you feel we have hit the nail spot-on.