Test driving Genesys Meeting Center
By Jason Meserve, NetworkWorld.com, 01/14/05
Back in September, Genesys gave me a free Meeting Center account to take for a test drive. As a journalist though, I tend to me more a meeting attendee rather than presenter. But this past week, Network World had a benefits briefing to go over some changes to our 401K offerings and the HR department asked if I could extend the in-house meeting to some of our remote folks. Perfect opportunity to test Meeting Center: It worked flawlessly.
Without training, I set up the meeting a day in advance, uploading the PowerPoint presentation so it would be ready to roll at the start of the meeting. The system sent out join information to those that we knew would want to attend, though the meeting was open to anyone. Day of the meeting I set my laptop up in the conference room and logged on to the system quickly using Genesys' Desktop Meeting Launcher, a system tray application that can launch ad hoc meetings or bring you straight into any meeting you've scheduled. I ran the online presentation separately from the one being presented to those in the room, just so we wouldn't have to load all the necessary control on the presenter's laptop at the last second. I knew it worked with mine, didn't need to risk anything.
The meeting lasted an hour and 45 minutes and the couple people who joined us remotely were happy with the results. The only thing they could participate in was when the guy doing the presentation was drawing on a paper flip chart - a problem for most Web conferencing technologies. The only other minor annoyance I had was the fact the telephone number provided in the meeting e-mail is squished together as a long number, with no spacing between the area code and exchange. For me, this makes it harder to dial quickly.
Overall, Genesys Meeting Center shined and it was nice to actually get behind the controls of a meeting rather than just join them as a participant.
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