Interwise leads field of 11 vendors in global test of voice/video over IP services
Genesys and Raindance have a waiting room where all meeting participants wait for the host to approve them before they attend the live meeting. Otherwise, we didn't find the level of security built into these two services very well adapted to the Internet, reflecting the heritage in traditional telephony. Eight of the 11 services (including Genesys and Raindance) also let the host press one button to lock a meeting room, preventing new participants from entering until a meeting is unlocked.
Beyond SSL, FaceToFaceMeeting, Interwise, Linktivity, Raindance and VidiTel add 128-bit encryption support. Others also might have additional encryption options but the ordinary user (whom the testers in this study represent) couldn't detect or make modifications to security settings from the portals or applications.
As mentioned earlier, seven of the 11 services tested permit hosts to record the meeting. Because of this, it's possible that meeting contents can be leaked (or shared) after a meeting. We feel the ability to archive a meeting holds a great deal of promise for information worker productivity. And provided the assets are managed securely on a service's network, we don't believe this presents a significant threat or corporate security or privacy. In fact, meeting-recording features might help companies comply with federal or industry-specific regulations regarding fair disclosure and provide the basis for e-learning.
Different ways to get work done
Once deployment, security and learning curves are addressed, employees should use technology to focus on business needs. Web conferencing services we tested fell into one of two camps (with the exception of Interwise and Linktivity, which seem to have negotiated a compromise). First, services such as WebEx and Centra, which grew in response to the needs of one presenter communicating to many in which people produce large virtual events (also known as Webinars) and expose participants to the same information at the same time. At the very minimum, this technology usage scenario requires robust invitation and entry management systems, support for polls and surveys, and a scalable network for a large number of participants to see the same information. The audience members need an extremely simple interface while the meeting host interface must provide crowd management functions such as hand-raising and queuing of questions. The seminar or event usage model also benefits from having a meeting archive and replay system for participants who can't attend a meeting or want to review an archive. These same platforms subsequently are adapted to serve smaller groups engaged in more collaborative activities.
Net results: Web conferencing test
Other platforms were designed from the ground up to bring people together in a peer-to-peer setting to collaborate toward a shared goal. In addition to the central actors in the collaboration, passive participants are allowed to observe. This scenario was adopted for our usability tests. Team members reviewed and made edits to files together, and saved the changes.
Despite only a few minor weaknesses, the services tested were highly functional in terms of supporting on-screen collaboration. Holding a telephone in one hand while typing a short text message or making a change on a document is impractical in the minds of all testers. If planning to use the PSTN for voice while doing collaborative meetings, IT should provide appropriate headsets. We liked that most services support emoticons, which appear next to names to indicate agreement or other emotion, but do not interrupt discussion.
One drawback of the event-centric services is that some crowd-management features are still in evidence, although not very useful in a more collaborative scenario. For example, when collaborating, peers expect to be able to interact as they do on a telephone conference call. When using VoIP with Centra eMeeting, the user must push a button to talk. Convoq's moderator-controlled multi-party meeting feature also was challenging to learn and needs enhancements before it can compete with other multi-party VoIP services. We liked that nine of the 11 services let the host see (by way of icons or colors next to participant names) who is speaking, and moderate (give and retrieve the podium and presenter rights). FaceToFaceMeeting and Convoq didn't have the speaker identification feature.
White boards during collaboration allow for on-screen annotation, usually individual remarks added to a white surface or over a graphic image. All services tested (except VidiTel) support whiteboarding, but integration levels differed. In eight of the 11 services, the white board is tightly integrated, but the Genesys white board appears to be a completely separate application that is launched when a white board is requested from a menu. Centra lets a person adjust the refresh rate of the screen manually during a meeting. When the bandwidth is limited, this is a beneficial feature because a slower refresh rate consumes less total bandwidth; for broadband users the default setting is too slow, interfering with collaboration because the typing on the screen and changes in files appear well after the host has referenced the changes. We liked having the ability to see, either through name or initials, the person who makes the annotations (Interwise did this very well).
We were pleased that a few services went beyond bitmapped graphics. Although it required an upload and conversion process, Raindance uses scalable vector graphics technology to show all the images and text in the shared space, ensuring high resolution and independent window sizing for all participants. Macromedia Breeze and Convoq use Flash paper and SWF files (Macromedia's Flash file format) to show any type of media in the shared meeting space.
All the services we tested with video-over-IP support also have the option of suppressing the video in one meeting, across a group of users or on the basis of a corporate policy. But collaborators in a Web conference might want to use the expressions they see on other faces to interpret the support (or lack thereof) of an idea.
With Centra, Convoq, Elluminate, Genesys and Raindance, participants can see only one video window at a time, usually the presenter or host. The host can pass the control to another participant who will then be seen, or the host can choose one person seen by all the others without providing that person full control of the meeting. When there are more than two participants and video is supported, the remaining services support four or more windows, and more closely resemble a multi-point videoconference. We didn't use the video quality as one of the metrics for our final score because of variations in our network bandwidths during testing. Interwise has an unusual implementation of personal video, in which the user must capture a snapshot of himself before sharing/sending out the video to the server. When the person is not speaking, the server reverts to the still image. This conserves bandwidth but reduces the effectiveness of video to detect non-verbal reactions.
We experienced the highest quality video and audio with the FaceToFaceMeeting service. The motion was fluid and the windows resizable. The application monitors bandwidth used against that which is available and performs dynamic rate adaptation. We also really liked the way the FaceToFaceMeeting user can put a call on hold to take another incoming call. The application still needs some work as far as the window management and user interface are concerned; currently an unlimited number of windows can be open at the same time and when one exceeds two or three it is very confusing on the screen.
We felt that, although it didn't have synchronized audio with it and only one participant's video can be seen at a time, the video in Raindance Meeting Edition also offered very high quality.
We like the way Macromedia Breeze offers the user, the host or both independently the ability to choose layouts from pre-configured templates, some of which prioritize the video windows (and others which minimize the video windows and emphasize the presentation or data viewing parts of the screen).
Managing everything
Users can change individual account settings (name, phone number, meeting templates and the like) through portals or preference settings in a runtime application. In general, the services tested let users generate reports, including past conferences, participants in conferences, results of polls, statistics on archive accesses and related historical data. Looking ahead, account holders can use their service portals to view upcoming meetings and create new meetings.
Integration with enterprise communications or workflow systems can greatly reduce overhead associated with populating online directories of collaborators. The large, event-ready platforms such as WebEx, Centra, Elluminate and Interwise let you import a list of people who could be invited to an event or conference. VidiTel and FaceToFaceMeeting use e-mail name convention to identify participants, and Convoq relies on a mix of IM identities and e-mail addresses, depending on how a person will be invited.
Centra, WebEx, Elluminate, Genesys, Macromedia and Interwise also have administrator accounts that let you set policies on behalf of groups of users. Administrator account holders can modify global settings involving meeting archives, network bandwidth utilization, and telephone bridging services for participants who cannot join by VoIP. These same services also offer special fields for billing codes, and let you export meeting reports in formats suitable for accounting.
Personal rich media conferencing through hosted services have matured significantly in the past two years. Mainstream users haven't necessarily discovered the full benefits and aren't clamoring for integrated voice and video yet, but we believe that given the option, they will quickly want to use services such as those we tested. We felt that having the option of bringing users together into an integrated conference regardless of their audio access technologies (a headset or the built-in computer audio systems, or a regular telephone or cell phone) is absolutely the mark all IT managers should be looking to provide their users.
Perey is an independent technology consultant in Montreux, Switzerland, specializing in rich media communications in enterprise and consumer markets. She can be reached at cperey@perey.com.