Webex and similar

[robbiehall]

Hi,

Does anyone use CISCO Webex, or a similar program, and do you have any thoughts?
What makes it good, or bad, for you?

Cheers
Rob

[cookie365]

I use WebEx. Not the cheapest option but it's rock solid and has everything we need, and it easily pays for itself in hotel and travel savings.

I particularly like the registration options that you can customise - so you can get people to (for example) tell you what they want out of the session when they sign up and then tailor the session to take the responses into account.

Not sure it's the best value option for large (hundreds plus) webcasts though - we're looking at GoToWebinar for that.

[annise]

agree with cookie365, not the cheapest option out there, and definitely not the greatest either. another web conferencing provider has a comparison of their image quality against webex and it does not look pretty. (rhubcom.com/v4/web_conferencing/webex_comparison.html)

There's definitely a lot of options out there that are better value, like gotomeeting, dimdim, mikogo

[cookie365]

Depends what you mean by 'better value' of course

What do you need it for Robbie?

[robbiehall]

Well, as usual I don't have a comprehensive brief, have just been asked to 'investigate', and we have used these kind of services before. I think the emphasis will be on desktop sharing and audio conferencing.

[cookie365]

For basics like that pretty much most of the options will do what you need, even the freebies.

Look for stuff like guaranteed uptime (probably only with the paid services), non-0844 phone numbers for the conference calls, encryption, that sort of thing.