I had a chat about web conferencing services with Sam Clark, the webinar expert.
I attended two of his webinars, one was through GoToMeeting and the other was through TalkingCommunities.
Web Conferencing service providers need to understand what goes on in the webinar organizer’s mind and what helps them make a decision to go with one service or the other.
The webinar organizer as well as the participants have some expectations, demands and basic requirements. Each web conferencing service has its own strengths and weaknesses. And webinar experts choose the ones that best suit their needs.
Strengths
Talking communities provides the facility to chat. Participants find it easy to type in their questions and interact with the speaker. The speaker can switch on or off the chat facility during the presentation. The other features include integrated audio facility (no need to connect through a telephone line), multimedia presentation features, communication with the participants before, during and after the presentation and recording facilities.
GoToMeeting is very professional in giving messages to participants and the speaker before, during and after the presentation. Participants get to know whenever there is any problem such as audio loss or connection failure and they get a message as soon as the problem is resolved.
If you think of desktop sharing during the presentation GoToMeeting is better than Talking Communities. Sam Clark chose GoToMeeting for Authority Site College webinar because he wanted to show the dashboard of WordPress to the participants.
But Sam missed the chatting facility of Talking Communities. For all the ASC webinars and ’16 Steps to Success’ webinars Sam uses Talking Communities. The audio quality of Talking communities is great, the chat facility is exceptionally good and the ease of logging in and sharing files is excellent.
I open this debate for webinar experts and participants. If you share your experiences with others it would benefit not only the webinar experts and participants but the web conferencing companies too. They will get to know what their potential customers want and will be able to develop their software and upgrade it to include the faciltiies that are in demand.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
i heard hyperoffice has recently launched its web conferencing service called hypermeeting , which integrates with HyperOffice – its collaboration solution. I beleive great benefits are to be had from integrated collaboration and web conferencing.
Thanks for your review of hyperoffice. We are looking forward to customer reviews of web conferencing services.
Thanks for the review! As web-conferencing gets more popular, it seems like there are so many options to choose from and growing day to day. There are many considerations; P2P or client/server, pay per minute or fixed rate, VOIP or telephone, big corporation or persoanlized small business, etc.
Hopefully personal experiences here can help people zero in on their specific needs and make the right choice.
Good news is Talking Communities is in final Beta testing of its own Desktop sharing service that will be incorporated into all existing web-conferencing.
It is very important that people make their choice depending on their needs. It is unlikely that any one single conference provider will ever be able to meet every single user-specific desire, so do your homework.
I completely agree with this view point: The more the options, the more home work for customers to compare and evaluate them to make the right choice.
This is where customer reviews and sharing of expereinces help immensely in reducing the time spent in studying all the options. We learn from not only our own experiences. We learn from experiences of trust worthy experts who offer valuable advice.
I believe any conferencing should be teamed with a technology to match the format. It’s too easy to get a webinar format mixed up with a simple teleconference. If there are no pictures or websites to view then a simple “land line” telephone connection works well. Especially since there are many choices to get something like 150 people on the same conference without paying anything other that the individual phone connections. Companies like freeconference.com, instantconference.com and nocostconference.com come to mind. And if you use Skype you can connect to these services nearly free.
These services have worked well for us when the subject is really only audio based. They give you the capability to mute people or to take questions. And you even get free audio recordings.
However, when you focus on visual content then choosing a good webinar company is important. And with any choice there are pros and cons. I’ve heard good and bad results with HotConference.com. I have not used any of the webinar services but know that it’s just a matter of time before I do so I’m going to be very interested in this thread.
Hi,
I’m using Gotowebinar (gotomeeting platform) services. I have never used TalkingCommunities and I can only speak from an organizer’s point of view.
To schedule new webinars is quite straight forward. You can easily customize the layout and add new panelists. During the webinar, I’m showing power points as well as Internet pages and our experts are doing technical presentations of our software. I’m based in France and I am often doing presentations with panelists abroad and attendees all over the world. I have never experienced any loss of connection and only when some “heavy jobs” are running, is there a 2 second gap between the moment we show the screen and the time the attendees see it. There is a panel with a Q/A section, a chat section, a recording option, etc. You can mute/unmute the attendees. You can easily give the hand to other panelists. For the audio, attendee can either call ( a local number is provided for a lot of countries) or use the VOIP. The platform is regurlarly updated and so far, I am very satisfied with the support department. I hope this will help you.
For the last month I have been comparing and researching 4 different web conferencing providers. When I started I was completely new to the web conferencing world, so all of my insights and opinions were completely unbiased. I noticed some interesting things about GoToMeeting, Adobe, Intercall, and Genesys. If anyone would like some information about these 4 different companies I would be happy to give you some insights. If you are deciding which one to buy just let me know and I can tell you the pros and cons of all four providers. This information ranges from best price to best features. I really feel like I have become an expert in the field of web conferencing and hope I can become of service to anyone. You can email me at lance.david.wilson@gmail.com.
One service that I believe is under the radar though is ReadyTalk. They are a small web conferencing service that has flexible pricing and great support. If you needs for web conferencing are small I highly recommend them because they will not disappoint you. Try ReadyTalk and see how if its a good fit for you.
Well, I have used many web conferencing services and was a beta tester with Hot Conference. Although it was quite good when it came out, the service severely lagged in growing to the demand of the consumer. I had sooo many freeze ups with Hot conference that it lead me to look for another provider.
I then bumped into Talking Communities and fell in love with it. The audio quality is superb. I tested this with over 300 people in the room and the quality was perfect. There are some other great features with talking communities incuding an advanced recording function that allows you to reply your webinar inside the room.
One of the best features is the excellent chat ability in which the attendees can interact with the webinar. Recently we did the 16 steps to success and the after hours interaction that occurred was simply amazing.
I have used gotowebianr as well, and although they have a very slick desktop application that works great, the chat functions stink. When Talking communities gets the desktop application working properly, then this application will have it all.
You must log in to post a comment.
{ 1 trackback }