Not your mother's Web conferencing services
By Keith Shaw, NetworkWorld.com, 04/18/05
Web conferencing has grown from its early days when you'd sit and watch a virtual PowerPoint presentation to something that is more collaborative between members of teams dispersed across the country or around the world. Peripheral devices like audio headsets and webcams are allowing people to sit in their offices and see and hear their co-workers as well as work on a project together in a hands-on fashion.
In our latest "In the Wild" test (results to hit the streets in early May), we tested 11 different hosted Web conferencing services that also provide the ability to add rich media content (integrated audio and/or video) to the typical Web conference.
This was truly a global test as Switzerland-based Network World Lab Alliance member Christine Perey of PEREY organized a test team scattered throughout Europe and here in the States (Massachusetts). One of the goals of the test was to see how Web conferencing services could work when members were located in different parts of the world. As part of the "In the Wild" designation, all of our tests occurred across the regular Internet, so our experiences mirror a realistic environment.
Following introductory briefings with service providers, test team members conducted hands-on tests on all components of personal multimedia conferencing and collaboration services in sub-teams of four participants. The four-member teams simulated the preparation of project documents and presentations over the Internet and their corporate networks.
Each service was evaluated for support of interactive voice communications (not the quality but connectivity, whether the support was for point-to-point or multipoint), video communications (bi-directional was not required but recommended), document viewing, document sharing (modification by user and/or host) and text chat.
When not in sessions, the evaluation team compared features that assist community members to communicate availability (state, presence), create and send multimedia messages, or schedule and initiate live sessions on a reservation and ad hoc basis.
Going into the test we thought VoIP integration would be more widely used across the services we tested, when in fact many of the services still rely on a regular PSTN connection to handle audio for the conferencing. However, many of these services integrated PSTN into the regular web conference in unique ways, such as the web conferencing application knowing when a person was on the separate audio bridge. Video was also disappointing – several services only allow for one window of video to be shown, usually the person who is talking or the session leader.
We were impressed by the level of integration with Office-based applications to handle meeting scheduling and to deliver invitations to potential participants. IT managers looking to add web conferencing services to their platter of applications should feel comfortable knowing that they can be easily integrated into existing e-mail and groupware systems.
That’s all I can tell you at this point – make sure you check out our final testing article on Monday, May 2. We also plan on updating our existing web conferencing online buyer's guide with the latest data from service providers and software vendors.
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