Top 6 Web conferencing products

Let's examine some of the top Web conferencing service providers, and discuss which product might be best for your needs. There are at least half a dozen conferencing products, including:

• Citrix GoToMeeting

• Conferral

• Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional (formerly called Macromedia Breeze)

• Microsoft Live Meeting

• Raindance Meeting Edition

• WebEx Meeting Center

Which is best for you? Ease of use matters the most, of course, but price and features are important too.

For simple meetings–say, a PowerPoint demo with text chat and audio conferencing–each of the six products listed above fills the bill. Interfaces do vary, however, and simpler is always better. Remember that Web conferencing is still a newfangled thing to many people, and there’s a good chance your attendees haven’t used it before. Or if they have, they may have used a different program–Live Meeting rather than WebEx, for instance.

Which is best? For idiot-proof simplicity, you can’t beat Citrix GoToMeeting which provides clearly-labeled icons and buttons and pop-up boxes with simple instructions.

At the high end, WebEx has the best overall package of goodies, including gee-whiz features like multi-point videoconferencing. What’s that? WebEx attendees can view thumbnail video windows of up to four participants at once. If you’ve ever watched The Brady Bunch, you get the idea.

The information in this tip originally appeared in the Web Conference Basics online class.