Web Conferencing Blog

With Acrobat Connect Pro, Adobe offers a web conferencing solution that does not need to fear comparison with big players such as GoToMeeting or WebEx Meeting Center. The overall handling of this software is easy and intuitive. The drawback is that essential features, e.g. transferal of mouse or keyboard control during meetings, are not included. Without these features Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro only ranks number 7.

If you want to check out Adobe’s online collaboration tools you can start out with the free Adobe Connect Now.

webconferencing-test.com now offers an RSS-Feed. Whenever we update an evaluation or include respectively remove a web conferencing solution from our ranking you will automatically be notified.

You can either subscribe right here or go to our evaluation site.

Take a look at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference and the politicians that participate. They arrive in their private planes, are then brought to their hotels in huge, non solar-powered limos, and then get together for one and a half weeks to save the world’s climate. At least that is the plan. In reality this little  get-together produces just as much carbon dioxide as a town the size of Middlesbrough, according to the British Telegraph. To pass the resolutions that are to be expected, the world’s leaders could have utilized more effective ways, saving money, time, and carbon emissions.

Granted, online conferences will not save the world, still, the idea to get the leaders of the world together in one great web conference is kind of intriguing.

The Convenos website is no longer accessible. We removed the tool – which ranked number 12 in our list of web conferencing solutions – from our site.

drop.io is attracting a lot of attention and is being used by many for various purposes. Usage is free, the tool has an integrated FTP-server, and enables adhoc data transfer. Firefox even provides an add-on „Drag & Drop.io“ which is already available in version 2.0.1.

Why then did we only rank it number 24? Well true, you can easily implement the tool and then exchange data with little effort, but drop.io doesn’t offer the complete package we expect from a good online conferencing solution.

Read our detailed evaluation here.

Conference IQ was next on our list of web conferencing solutions to be tested. Unfortunately the website is no longer available. If you have any news on this tool, we’d be glad to hear it.

After Cisco had announced to no longer offer new WebEx MeetMeNow subscriptions, we evaluated their online meeting solution WebEx Meeting Center, which is now available in version 8.5. This tool offers a broad variety of functions and can thus be applied in numerous cases. However, by offering more features the complexity of the tool has grown as well and makes usage less simple and intuitive.

We have changed the layout of our web conferencing portal to give you more ease of use, a better overview of topics, and we slightly altered our categories for improved navigation. You can now find the details for our Top 5 license models under „compact results“. News regarding enterprise models are now directly on the homepage.

The new layout is not only more practicable, it has one other advantage: It simply looks good!

More and more providers are releasing or upgrading their software in the hopes of grabbing a share of the growing online meeting market. To provide a broad overview of the web conferencing solutions available we are constantly checking out the new tools out there. At the moment, tools that are being tested include drop.io, Conference IQ, iLinc for Meeting, InstantPresenter, Saba Centra Live for eMeetings and Mikogo.

We have made it our rule to not evaluate enterprise online meeting tools but we would nevertheless like to make you aware of RHUB, which we find to be an interesting web conferencing solution.

TurboMeeting exists in various versions. In the smallest version two web conferences can take place in parallel with a total of 10 participants. On the upside, TurboMeeting supports a broad range of platforms, e.g. Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris/Unix, iPhone. On the downside, neither VoIP nor a telephone conferencing service is integrated.

As an enterprise solution RHUB is definitely interesting. Yet, with our focus on SMBs we will not evalutate the tool in detail.