Free online meeting / web conferencing / collaboration

With online meeting becoming more and more pipular, there are two major trends of online meeting software available . These are:

- Collaboration with Desktop Sharing

- Collaboration at a online meeting place

Online Meeting place:

Online meeting place software give you an online area where everyone joins, you can upload a presentation (presentation capability) and create whiteboards etc for collaboration. This is the traditional type of online meeting. You can change presenters, and the collaboration is easy. The biggest caveat is that you cannot collaborate freely and edit documents realtime. So if you want to collaborate on that Adobe logo you were working on, you wont be able to. A few of these software (such as DimDim, vyew) allow you to share your desktop as well so that this can be achieved.

Desktop Sharing:

Desktop sharing tools allow you as the presenter to share your desktop with various attendees. Most of these also provide annotation tools so that the collaboration can be real time, where the desktop acts as a whiteboard. The benifit of these meeting tools is that it allows collaboration on any kind of documents – Microsoft documents, presentations, pdfs, comic book, picture .. anything. The biggest caveat with these software is sharing desktop with too many users may really slow down everything. Yugma and ConferencingNOW allows for this

There are a few softwares which provide you with both capabilities. In the end which kind of software you want to use depends on the following:

- Do you just want to present or collaborate?

For teachers who are just presenting a concept to the students, presentation capability is more than enough. For sales people a sales meeting, presentation tools is enough. For two colleagues who are working on a document for a client, desktop sharing is probably better- You can edit the document online and agree.

- What features do you want?

I like VOIP better than teleconferencing. Why? Just because whenever I have an online meeting its with people sitting internationally who will incur huge costs. If my conferencing solution doesnt provide VOIP I just dont get it. I can always use something like skype to talk, but thats too much hassle. When there are alternatives available why take headaches?  You may want other things like – specific annotation tools, change presenter, recording, download the changed presentation, real time editing etc.

- What do you want to hide?

This subtitle doesnt sound like a good news, but its true. I may usually not want to share my desktop when I am in a client meeting because it has all kinds of documents. But if I am with a  colleague it should be ok.  So what have you got to hide?

- Which free tools provide best of both worlds:

To my information vyew and dimdim both provide the best of both worlds. But then when you say best of both the worlds, you have to realize – its not “all of the both worlds”.

- Dont get hung on one

It may seem like a good idea to choose one for yourself or your small business. But the truth is, most of these tools are progressing too fast. You never know when the one you decided to give up on goes better than anything else.  So keep trying different ones.