I had two very different experiences in the last few weeks which showed how valuable web conferences can be when working with distributed teams in projects, or for that matter for any technical issue that you need to work on over a distance. The good experience: I had an issue with a portfolio management tool that we are deploying, and after setting up a web conference with the software provider’s support team, I was able to show the actual problem happening, my logs, talk to their support people… Overall, just about the best we could get without the support people actually being there with me (which might have been difficult, given that they are in Canada and I am in Brazil). The bad experience: I had to draw up a kind of network diagram for another project that I am working on. The problem is, the people actually responsible for the system’s architecture are both in different cities from me, the closest one being two hours away by car. Not having a web conference tool available, getting this diagram right involved countless e-mail, phone and IM sessions until it was done. These contrasting situations, both happening in a time span of two weeks, made me decide that I needed a web conference tool that I could use for my own conferences, so that I could set one up easily whenever I needed it. Off I went to Google, and after some research here are the best offerings that I found:
Dimdim is a very interesting option, for one single, simple reason: it is free to use as a hosted service, but even better, it is an open source project so you can download the server application and host it yourself. There is a totally free Community Edition, and also an Enterprise Edition, which is priced quite reasonably compared to competitors with similar features, and allow for private branding (logos, URLs, etc). For an individual consultant or freelancer, though, this is overkill - either host it yourself if you have the skills or use the free hosted version. You definitely want to check this out if you are looking into web conferencing.
Adobe’s offering in this field is very competitive. Reasonably priced at U$39.95 per month for unlimited conferences with up to 15 users (more than enough for most people, I imagine), it has a very slick user interface - as we have come to expect from Adobe products. The major drawback is that there is no audio and you cannot record meetings in this version, only in the professional edition which costs a lot more.
WebEx is the most popular of the online tools, and there is a reason for that. The service is simple, while offering all the common features, and the pricing is very reasonable at US$49 per month for the basic plan. If you are the kind of person who likes to stick with the market standard, or are too busy (or lazy :P) to research too much, WebEx is a good solution for you.
Spreed is a newcomer to this field (as far as I can tell), based in Germany. It is a very good option if your meetings are usually just you and one or two others, since their meetings are always free for up to three people. Beyond that it gets more expensive than the competitors (around €69 per month for the basic package) - but for my needs three participants would generally be enough. You also have the “pay-as-you-go” option which you could use for the exceptional occasions where you need more than three participants.
Yugma is also a relative newcomer, and it offers free conferencing for up to 10 participants, which is awesome. Problem is, it didn’t work on my machine :( I found reports from a bunch of other people who couldn’t get it to work either. They have a Skype edition which would be great if you already use Skype, but again, at least for me it didn’t work. Yugma shows a lot of promise, but it needs to be more reliable to be considered a contender in this field.
As we can see, there are a lot of options for individuals and small businesses to use web conferencing for a very reasonable price. There might be other options which I did not find in my research. Of course, there are also the big guys, such as Microsoft and IBM, who have their own conferencing solutions, but these are usually far too expensive for the little guy.
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