Government Computer News
Is it Live or WebEx?
GCN Lab tests two leading online collaboration tools and finds Microsoft’s easier to use
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Being a lab reviewer entails a lot of meetings, sometimes three or four a week, with companies that have new products they want to demonstrate. For the past several years, almost all of the meetings that boast a Web component have been conducted using Meeting Center software from WebEx Communications Inc.
The WebEx software has captured most of the online meeting market, to the point where people are starting to use it as a noun like Kleenex or Xerox, as in “Let’s do a WebEx on this new product.”
Slowly but surely however, some of our online meetings are being conducted on a different platform: Microsoft’s Live Meeting. Not to be outdone, WebEx has tried to stay ahead with a new version of its Meeting Center. We decided to try the latest versions of each platform to see which is better, both from a participant and a presenter standpoint.
Microsoft Live Meeting 2005
Reviewer's comments: Easy for all participants to use, but limited meeting control
Box score: A-
Performance: A-
Ease of use: A
Features: B
Value: B+
Microsoft is making an aggressive push into this space, and they are using a lot of their old tricks to make the move successful. One of the smartest things they did was the same thing that worked when Office XP came out. They designed the program with the same standard Microsoft look and feel. If a user knows how to use Word or Excel, they are going to have a much easier time learning Live Meeting 2005.
For example, the well-known layout of “getting started” panels on one side and function icons along the top is the rule of the day. Even if you have not been officially trained to use Live Meeting, Office users intuitively know that if they want to do something with the program, there’s probably an icon for that function. You can hover your mouse over the buttons till you find the right one.
From a presenter standpoint, much has changed to make Live Meeting easy to use. For example, the program now supports a three-pane layout, which is not only efficient, but works well with modern large-format LCDs, many of which have 16 by 9 layout ratios. You can set up the program with your slide deck in one window, a thumbnail of the next slide in the second window and the live window visible to meeting participants in the third.
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