Save your cash, travel stress and improve your productivity with these FREE web meeting tools
In today’s hectic business world the topic of real-time collaboration, where colleagues, client and business associates can share screen remotely to review presentations or key documents, is hot on the agenda. Not only do these tools provide a quick and easy way to interact, they can enable making smarter decisions, help win the deal and save you both time and money in doing so – what more can you ask!
Even better a number of the established players in this market space offer FREE – yep it’s that word again – for hard pressed businesses, consultants and entrepreneurs to take advantage of enterprise class tools to helping you getting instant productivity-boosting results. For example, how many miles do you drive each year for those 30-60 minute meeting walking through a presentation – when a teleconference and desktop sharing can achieve the same thing, with environmental benefits too.
Recently, I’ve been using the three tools highlighted below to liaise with client and vendors alike, Quite frankly these e-meeting solutions, their feature lists and quality of implementation are amazing – who needs WebEx, Cisco’s paid-for alternative, when there is great stuff like this on the web.
Personally I’d recommend you try and evaluate each one to see which suits you best – that said you don’t need to restrict yourself to just using one – all three are free to use, with no 30-days restrictions like some demo / trial solutions and you may just need to use one or the other depending on how you need to work that day. For example Vyew great is are restricted with installing downloads or have a high number of participants – whereas Mikogo and DimDim perhaps shade it with a slicker more up to date interface.
Don’t forget you can also use these tools to provide remote access support to colleagues or, in my case, family member when they are struggling with computer troubles and error issues. Ideally, you would have set up LogMeIn in adavance -which was the topic of an earlier post – however if this is not the case the these tools offer an instant solution that’s easier to set-up as a one-off solution.
FEATURES | Mikogo | Vyew | DimDim |
Desktop Sharing | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Participants | up to 10 | up to 100 | up to 20 |
Switch Presenter | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Remote Control | Yes | *Yes | Yes |
Session Scheduler | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Recording / Playback | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Whiteboard | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Transfer Files | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Download Required | +Yes | No | No |
+ No installation required for participants | |||
*Java download for remote control feature |
Which ever one you ultimately chose as your favourite, you are sure to establish neat way to work smarter and hopefully impress your clients and colleagues alike.
Another good alternative to Mikogo is RHUB. It is fully compatible with MAC and PC.