Five Web Conferencing Packages

All of this adds up to a missed opportunity for vendors who, until recently, paid lip service to the small-biz market, yet trotted out technology--and price tags--where the only new feature was the marketing pitch. A few years ago, this was probably a reasonable approach: Many smaller firms didn't see the benefits of using such tools, and most lacked the desktop hardware and the Internet bandwidth to use them effectively, anyway.

Today, that's changing faster than you can buy a $10 hot dog at O'Hare Airport. Smaller firms, like their larger counterparts, are searching aggressively for ways to make the most of tight travel budgets, to extend their marketing reach and to turn their information assets into competitive advantages. As a result, they're increasingly ready, willing and able to take advantage of Web meeting products, given the right set of features and realistic price/licensing models.

Making a Choice

The five Web conferencing products you'll read about here represent the market as a whole pretty well. Some products here are the result of corporate acquisitions, while others originated with the companies selling them today. It includes a relatively young startup (Convoq), a vertical-market success testing the mainstream waters (Elluminate), an established tech-industry player looking for new growth opportunities (Citrix) and the Web conferencing market's most dominant brand (WebEx).

And of course, it includes Microsoft: A company whose presence in any market ensures higher stakes, longer odds, shorter development cycles--and very little room for error.

Each of the five products in this roundup--Citrix GoToMeeting, Convoq ASAP Pro, Elluminate Live, Microsoft LiveMeeting and WebEx MeetMeNow--offer different, if overlapping, features, along with varying strengths and weaknesses. If you want a bargain-priced product with built-in videoconferencing, for example, give Convoq ASAP and Elluminate Live a closer look; if you prefer a product that focuses on a high-quality desktop- and application-sharing tool and you don't care about integrated audio/video, Citrix GoToMeeting is a good first choice. Ultimately, deciding what you want your Web conferencing product to do will go a long way toward deciding which products deserve a more thorough tire-kicking.

Although the differences between these products will quickly become obvious, it's just as easy to recognize some important shared traits. To begin with, each of these products extends the ability to call quick, informal small-group meetings--integrated IM and e-mail notification tools, for example, make it easy for a user to organize one-on-one or small-group sessions in a matter of minutes.

All five of the examples reviewed here also require the use of dedicated client software, at least for meeting organizers and account administrators. Here, too, are interesting differences. Elluminate Live uses a Java-based desktop client to extend full support to non-Windows desktops; Citrix and Microsoft also use Java, but only extend full support to users running Windows PCs; and Convoq uses a Flash-based client interface in a similar way, providing cross-platform support to meeting attendees but not to organizers.

If you require a product that supports non-Windows systems, pay close attention to each product's platform requirements. Except for the Java-based, truly cross-platform Elluminate Live, the products in this review offer key conferencing features only on Windows systems, although most offer at least some options for inviting non-Windows users to meetings. This kind of platform-specific approach won't trouble most users--but for some, it could be a show-stopper.

Winners Vs....Other Winners

One thing you won't find in this group is a lame product: Although features such as VoIP audio quality varied between products, I never encountered a really serious quality issue. Keep in mind, however, that all of these products are only as good as the bandwidth, networking components and desktop hardware supporting them. Desktop-sharing tools, for example, are often more sensitive to bandwidth issues than even live video feeds; if you can't meet a Web meeting vendor's hardware and bandwidth requirements with room to spare, don't whine when the product fails to work as it should.

In terms of support, all five products are especially kind to do-it-yourself types, offering more than enough documentation, tutorial libraries, FAQs and knowledge bases, and other material to keep you sidetracked on interesting trivia for weeks. Although I did not spend enough time visiting with all five vendors' live support staff to judge some better or worse than others, my general impression is that the support personnel working at these software vendors are generally a cut or two above average--and some users may even find themselves treated as more knowledgeable than they really are. If that's not ideal, look at the upside: It's better than being treated like an idiot, and better still than talking to one.

Falling Prices Ahead

Finally, a word about the one "feature" on every business user's list: pricing.

All five of these products are absurdly cheap compared to the licensing, provisioning, support and various other bloodsucking devices vendors apply to corporate customers who require Web meeting products that can serve hundreds or even thousands of licensed seats. When you take a closer look, however, some important differences emerge here.

Some vendors, such as WebEx and Citrix, are all about simplicity and economy in their licensing and pricing schemes, while others, such as Elluminate and especially Microsoft, require a second or third reading to determine how much it'll cost you. Some, such as WebEx, also throw in the cost of telephone conference calls, which you'll almost always have to make with products that don't support VoIP audio, while others expect you to organize these services--and to pay for them--on your own. And keep in mind that this is a very volatile market. By the time you read this, at least some of these vendors will probably offer lower prices and easier licensing terms.

At this writing, all five vendors in this review offered free trials of their products. In fact, there's no good reason why you should even consider a Web meeting product that doesn't allow a free test drive. This market is too competitive, and too crowded with quality products, to bother with vendors who won't bother with you.

(A note: Besides the five options you'll find here, our colleagues at Network Computing last month reviewed five other notable Web conferencing products. Although their lineup looks a bit more into the corporate market than ours--including the current WebEx enterprise option--it's every bit as interesting and useful for small-business owners trying to get a sense of what's available in this market.)

Citrix is the corporate IT world's version of a household name. Many of the world's biggest companies have relied upon the company's access control, software virtualization and remote-access tools for years.

One thing Citrix customers did not rely upon, however, was the company's IP-based hosted services: It didn't have any. Before Citrix acquired dot-com-era startup ExpertCity in 2004, the company had focused almost entirely upon its core of premises-based technologies. Today, with former ExpertCity technology and staff leading its Citrix Online division, the company is making an aggressive move into IP-based remote access and live presence technologies.

The Citrix Web conferencing product, GoToMeeting, focuses on the same desktop- and application-sharing technology used in its sibling product, GoToMyPC. It's a smart decision that plays to its strength: In this roundup, GoToMeeting delivered the smoothest and most responsive shared-desktop performance, especially on an underpowered Windows 2000 system using a relatively slow (10 Mbps) 802.11b wireless LAN connection. According to Citrix, one of the advantages of using GoToMeeting is the company's use of special compression technology to make is desktop-sharing tool less vulnerable to network glitches.

Indeed, desktop- and application-sharing is where GoToMeeting truly shines. The product includes some thoughtful security- and privacy-enhancing features designed to spare you the potential for serious embarrassment (or serious unemployment) if the wrong person sees a message, image, bit of text or any other sensitive information you might overlook. One such precaution allows a user to share only a specific application, rather than one's entire desktop. GoToMeeting also permits meeting organizers to show their entire desktop--automatically stripped of taskbar, icons and background. It's a seemingly minor enhancement, but it helps to make users more confident that they control the software, and not the other way around.

While GoToMeeting executes its key features extremely well, there are several common Web conferencing options it does not include. You won't, for example, get integrated VoIP or videoconferencing with this product. VoIP is an increasingly popular and widely used technology, and many customers will consider its absence a strike against GoToMeeting. Before you cross Citrix off your list, however, take note of a service the company offers instead: Free (but not toll-free) audioconferencing services included as part of a subscriber's monthly fee. Like WebEx, GoToMeeting lists a dial-in number and access code each time an organizer sets up a new meeting; if organizers prefer to use a different conferencing service, they can override the provided number and code with their own information.

GoToMeeting does allow a meeting organizer to record a session in Windows Media (WMV) format, including a playback of any shared-desktop sessions, notes, presentation slides and whiteboard annotation. If organizers want to capture the audio from a conference call and add it to the recording, however, they'll have to jump through a few extra hoops, including the use of additional software.

When a firm wants to use GoToMeeting, the administrator must register each licensed user or organizer and notify them via e-mail or IM. The notice they receive includes directions for installing a small client applet that sits in the Windows system tray. Although the applet is written in Java, GoToMeeting still requires meeting organizers to use a Windows PC; presumably, GoToMeeting uses Windows-specific services to provide key features that Citrix can't replicate easily across other platforms.

Besides its privacy-protecting desktop-sharing tools, Citrix also emphasizes network data security as a major selling point for GoToMeeting. This includes end-to-end 128-bit encryption of all meeting data (including shared files, text messaging and screen-sharing sessions), while also enforcing strong end-user authentication and the use of passwords on all meeting sessions. Finally, to avoid another possible source of desktop disasters, GoToMeeting will automatically shut down screen-sharing sessions after a certain length of time without activity on the screen.

Except for WebEx, Citrix offers one of the simplest, cheapest licensing plans available in this group of products. In fact, the base version of GoToMeeting currently offers exactly the same terms as WebEx (monthly and annual per-user licenses; each user can organize unlimited meetings with up to 10 attendees) at the same prices. In addition, Citrix hosts an upmarket product, GoToMeeting Corporate, which adds user- and group-management features, along with larger capacities for meeting sessions. Unfortunately, Citrix does not publish either specific pricing or even a price range for this service; instead, it requires interested users to contact a sales representative for price information--a tactic that I personally find annoying when dealing with what is still essentially a retail product.

You may never have heard of Convoq, but it comes recommended: More than $17 million in venture capital funding over the past three years has helped the company build a solid Web conferencing platform and a very strong business model. Convoq recently launched a custom-integrated version of its Web meeting tool, dubbed SellASAP, for Salesforce.com users. Convoq also sells private-labeled versions of its conferencing tools to large corporations, software makers and online communities. It's a combination that allows Convoq to diversify its business without spreading its development efforts too thin.

Convoq's flagship product comes in two versions, distinguishable more by their licensing models than by any real technological differences. Convoq ASAP Pro supports meetings with up to 15 attendees, making it well suited for small businesses and independent-minded corporate workgroups. Individual ASAP users purchase licenses (similar to most desktop software licensing), and only license-holders can initiate meetings or use the desktop-sharing tool. Other meeting participants do not require licenses, however, and they have full access to audio, video and text messaging features, as well as the ability to annotate shared presentations.

Convoq ASAP Conference Room, the company's other core Web conferencing product, allows up to 200 participants. It uses a floating-license model that, along with its greater scalability, makes it more suitable for online seminars, e-learning applications and all-hands meetings at larger companies.

Convoq built the product on Macromedia's Flash Communications Server platform, which provides a foundation for the product's audio, video and collaboration features, in addition to its interface design. In spite of its Flash origins, though, ASAP Pro is not a truly cross-platform solution; the product's client software for initiating and directing meetings requires a Windows-based PC. In general, however, Convoq's choice of a FlashComm foundation does allow the product to take a platform-neutral approach: Windows, Mac OS, Linux and Solaris users with Flash-enabled browsers have one-click access to meetings.

Convoq ASAP Pro also stands out as one of the more complete Web meeting packages in this group. While its VoIP quality wasn't quite as good (and wasn't as flexible in its ability to recover from glitches) as Elluminate Live, I found the quality sufficient for everyday business use, given a relatively quiet location. Likewise, the product's built-in videoconferencing feed was clear and consistent.

ASAP Pro allows meeting organizers (or other licensed participants with an installed client) to share their desktops with the group. It's worth noting that, in many cases, the desktop- and application-sharing features appear to be more vulnerable to bandwidth and network latency issues than video or VoIP. Normally, I ran these tools using either 100 MB Ethernet or 802.11g wireless networking, almost always without any trouble. When I threw my jury-rigged version of "low bandwidth" simulation into the mix--a system using 802.11b wireless and running some packet-hungry streaming media apps--the shared-desktop tools were always the first to act flaky or, in a few cases, simply quit. Whether this is due to different data-compression methods or some other reason, it's likely to create a major bottleneck for users stuck on a dialup connection.

Convoq ASAP Pro works very effectively with instant messaging technology, and hard-core IM addicts should pay special attention to this product. ASAP can integrate with any of the major IM clients to provide attendee contact and management features; the client can, for example, monitor the availability of users invited to a meeting, automatically sending a "ready" message when everyone checks in as available. It's a clever, practical attendee-management tool, and Convoq made a wise choice to rely so heavily upon IM technology.

Can a product built for academia hack it in the corporate world? Not only can Elluminate Live handle the transition, it's the equal of any product in this group. In fact, Elluminate Live is your best choice if you're looking for Web meeting software that offers a full slate of features, including integrated audio and video, and you need a solution that works just as well on non-Windows platforms.

Elluminate Live is also the most unusual of these five choices, for a couple of reasons. First, the product's vertical-market origin clearly played a role in its design and functionality. For the past five years or so, Elluminate's hosted Web conferencing software (known as vClass) has been one of the most successful e-learning and distance-learning solutions for colleges, public school systems, and other education providers. In early 2004, looking to expand is presence in the mainstream business market, Elluminate split what would have been vClass 4.0 into three versions, launching new Enterprise and Team editions alongside its original Academic Edition.

Elluminate Live Academic Edition offers some special features, such as a tool to assist students with math assignments, that its siblings don't include. As with many of its competitors, however, the Enterprise and Team editions differ mostly in terms of scalability, with corresponding licensing and price terms. The Team Edition is geared toward smaller firms: It supports single-room meeting sessions with up to 10 participants (versus unlimited-size sessions with breakout-room options in the Enterprise Edition), but otherwise differs little from the enterprise product.

Like Convoq ASAP, Elluminate Live includes integrated VoIP support that I found good enough to use with confidence in almost any situation. Of the two products, Elluminate offers some extra quality-of-service features that could make it better suited for dealing with spotty network conditions: When a network glitch causes the audio to drop out for a few seconds, Elluminate's server-based software will detect the dropout and re-send the missing audio, speeding up the feed slightly until it catches up to the real-time feed. Elluminate Live also allows individual participants to adjust their audio and video feeds manually to suit their bandwidth and desktop hardware. Although this makes the product more complex, it's also a feature that users don't have to use or even to know about unless absolutely necessary.

Besides access to a shared whiteboard, a complete set of user-feedback tools (such as virtual "hand raising" for questions and mood indicators to provide non-verbal feedback) and integrated messaging, Elluminate Live gives a meeting moderator the ability to let any participant share his or her desktop--a feature that the other products in this group provide only to participants using Windows-specific client software (and, as with Convoq ASAP, may limit to licensed users). Besides full-desktop and application sharing options, Elluminate Live users can also choose to share a particular desktop window or even an arbitrary piece of the desktop.

Elluminate Live, like competing products from Citrix and Microsoft, uses a Java-based client to interact with users' desktop systems. Unlike its competitors, however, Elluminate takes advantage of Java's cross-platform capabilities to provide full support for non-Windows PCs. I tried out the client application on Linux and Mac OS X desktops, in addition to my Windows XP and Windows 2000 systems, and was impressed with the results. The product's ecumenical approach, by the way, extends to its ability to import and display shared presentation slides created using the open-source OpenOffice.org and StarOffice software suites, in addition to standard PowerPoint support. (The last does require a Web-based conversion tool to convert and load the slides prior to starting a meeting).

Finally, Elluminate Live's use of Java permits it to integrate with popular third-party tools for disabled users, including JAWS, one of the most popular screen-reading tools among the sight-impaired. Elluminate actually places a great deal of emphasis upon accessibility: Its products comply with major disability-access standards such as the U.S. government's Section 508 guidelines and the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative, and they include features like closed-captioning for VoIP feeds and adjustable-size user-interface options. Although this aspect of Elluminate's product development and marketing initially took me by surprise, it's the sort of feature that would have been absolutely essential for education users--and is now increasingly important to businesses, as well.

As the market for Web conferencing software shook off its recession-induced doldrums, Microsoft faced a familiar dilemma: Should the company continue to build a solution entirely from scratch or acquire technology that would commit it to a certain direction but also allow it to hit the ground running? In early 2003, Microsoft made its choice--the company bought PlaceWare, which it now operates as a wholly owned subsidiary.

PlaceWare, however, was a somewhat different animal than Intranets.com (a recent WebEx purchase) or ExpertCity (which Citrix bought in 2004). Its target market and core services had a much stronger enterprise focus. This fact has undeniably served Microsoft well: PlaceWare's back-end infrastructure, which Redmond has extended and improved, today includes three major data centers and enough server capacity to host meetings with hundreds of thousands of concurrent participants--capacity which is essential to customers with strict quality-of-service and security requirements.

In other ways, Microsoft required more time to deliver a truly competitive product: Previous versions of Live Meeting earned mixed reviews, and Microsoft took heat for leaving major feature-set gaps in what was ostensibly a complete Web conferencing package. Today, Live Meeting is a far more complete product and a better fit with its other business productivity tools; the Live Meeting user interface, for example, sports a look that any Microsoft Office user will recognize.

Live Meeting also shares another common trait with Office: It provides access to a feature set that sometimes seems bottomless and that can intimidate or confuse less experienced users. Indeed, more than any of the other products in this group, Live Meeting demands--and rewards, for those who need it--the time and effort required to master it. Users who want a comparatively simple, standalone Web conferencing solution (or who want integrated video, which is one of the few things Live Meeting doesn't offer) may find competing products more suitable. Users who never met a configuration option they didn't like, including superior administrative and management features; who want very tight integration with Microsoft Office; or who want a product with a clear and virtually unlimited upgrade path may find that Live Meeting is exactly what they need.

As you'd expect with a more upmarket product, the Live Meeting administration tools are designed to handle situations such as multiple meeting organizers, large resource collections (which can include PowerPoint slides, other Office-formatted documents or multimedia content) and a wide variety of user scenarios. If you're meeting with a group of unfamiliar people, features such as a virtual "seating chart" can make the meeting-management process a bit more intuitive than simply dealing with a list of participants. There's also more than a hint of by-the-book corporate discipline in the product--a meeting organizer can, for example, deal with late arrivals by holding them as a group in a virtual "waiting room" (where they can be admitted to the meeting at an appropriate time, or perhaps provide a captive audience for a stern punctuality lecture).

If you're familiar with earlier versions of the PlaceWare toolset, you should note that Microsoft has filled in quite a few of the gaps. Live Meeting now includes integrated VoIP support, for example, with excellent sound quality and fine-tuning controls. In addition, Live Meeting takes a very straightforward approach to archiving Web meeting sessions: If it happens during the meeting, you can record it and save it. (Live Meeting's session-archive features, by the way, are a good example of the product's massive feature set--among other things, you can search the archive by date or data range, meeting ID, words in the meeting's user-assigned title or meeting organizer, and you can control read/write access to archived content with role-based permissions.)

It should come as no surprise that meeting organizers who want full access to the Live Meeting toolset, including desktop-sharing features, will have to install a client that runs on Windows 2000/XP/Server 2003, using either Internet Explorer or Netscape. Meeting participants, however, can also install a Java-based Live Meeting client that works on Mac OS and Solaris systems running either IE or Netscape. (Linux users will presumably have to ask someone afterwards about the meeting, since they're not going to be joining it.) All in all, Live Meeting's system requirements are comparable to the other products in this group except Elluminate Live.

In any case, these requirements will be more than enough to satisfy Live Meeting's most likely users, as will the product's predictably outstanding integration with Microsoft Office and especially Outlook. It's drop-dead easy to share any type of Office document in Live Meeting, and it's also possible to organize and call a meeting on the fly using controls placed in the Office toolbar, via Outlook and Messenger. All of this desktop power, along with the audio features, desktop and application sharing, and other tools, is something you'll enjoy considerably more on a Windows XP machine than you will using Windows 2000, which provided a noticeably slower experience at times.

Microsoft's price and licensing information for Live Meeting is more complex, by far, than any of its competitors discussed here. It can only benefit Microsoft to rethink this approach and grab new users with crystal-clear flat-rate terms, at least to a point: With WebEx and Citrix both pushing no-surprises pricing as a key benefit for small-biz users, Live Meeting will almost certainly lose some potential customers over this distinction. Considering that Microsoft cannot yet count on a secure future for Live Meeting in the small-business market, much less on dominating the market, I wouldn't be surprised to see a much cheaper price and much simpler packaging in the not-too-distant future.

WebEx has been around the block. The publicly owned company has not only survived the dot-com bubble, it has thrived, as more large companies replace expensive business travel, whenever possible, with high-quality, Internet-based conferencing tools.

Until very recently, WebEx focused its Web meeting products--and its pricing--squarely at the enterprise market. Faced with a rapidly growing small-business market for Web conferencing technology, WebEx answered when opportunity knocked: Last summer, it paid $45 million for Intranets.com, a company whose online collaboration and productivity tools were focused upon serving the small to midsize business (SMB) market.

Along with an instant small-business customer base--Intranets.com owned 9,000 accounts, totaling more than 300,000 users--WebEx bought the core of a Web meeting solution designed specifically for small-business and individual professional users. As the name implies, MeetMeNow is intended to be an intuitive, hassle-free solution that encourages impromptu, small-group interactions. While MeetMeNow has a completely different technology pedigree than the other WebEx products, it does share their use of the company's owned-and-operated MediaTone network, which includes data centers and other infrastructure designed to satisfy its enterprise customers' service and security requirements.

Together with Citrix GoToMeeting, MeetMeNow offers the cheapest, most straightforward licensing package of the products in this group. MeetMeNow is also an interesting competitive match against Citrix GoToMeeting in several other ways: Both companies market their products' desktop-sharing capabilities as the single most important feature; and both eschew integrated VoIP and videoconferencing tools (which are available in the WebEx enterprise-class Web meeting products) in favor of packaged conference-calling options that are included in the price of the service. In fact, WebEx and Citrix use almost identical methods of integrating a pre-arranged conference dial-in number and access code into the client software interface, making it available as soon as an organizer sets up a new meeting.

The two products' screen-sharing features are not as evenly matched: MeetMeNow offers a far more basic shared desktop: It cannot limit sharing to applications, windows or screen selections (as can Elluminate Live); nor can it match GoToMeeting's innovative desktop-sweeping feature. This may not always be a handicap--WebEx is still a good choice for users who require simple screen-sharing support and place greater emphasis upon simplicity and ease of use--but it does suggest that WebEx is likely to dress up its bare-bones shared desktop with some additional selling points in the months to come.

WebEx may not have the most feature-rich product, but the company did not make many mistakes with its current set of conferencing tools. MeetMeNow sports a clean, simple user interface that will appeal to users who want a product with a short learning curve and an unobtrusive desktop presence. The MeetMeNow client sits in the system tray when a user chooses to start it at Windows login time, and when opened, forms a narrow line of modular controls, all of which can be collapsed into a very small toolbar. Most of the product's features are available with one or two mouse clicks, and while the icons used to identify some features are not exactly intuitive, MeetMeNow takes no chances on being too obscure or subtle with the single most dangerous feature (that is, dangerous to one's career prospects) of any desktop-sharing software: "You Are Sharing Your Screen" appears in clear block letters at the very top the client controls.

Like its competitors, MeetMeNow allows a user either to schedule a meeting and invite attendees ahead of time or to call a meeting on the fly. Either way, invitations are especially easy to send via e-mail, with integrated Microsoft Outlook support. Sending invites via IM requires copying and pasting a link into an instant messaging client window, although WebEx also supports one-click access to its client tools from buttons placed within AOL, Yahoo, MSN or Windows Messenger IM clients. In addition, AOL provides a version of its IM product that supports closer integration with WebEx.

If simplicity and ease of use are powerful selling points for MeetMeNow, it's also fair to note that some users will want more than WebEx provides in its small-business product. Besides its lack of integrated videoconferencing, MeetMeNow also lacks a separate shared whiteboard or the ability to display presentation slides without activating the shared-desktop feature. Also, while MeetMeNow beats Citrix GoToMeeting with its integrated telephone conference-calling feature, Citrix grabs the edge in terms of desktop-sharing tools: MeetMeNow participants can only share their entire desktop, not applications or windows (although the MeetMeNow controls do not appear in the shared view), and it cannot match GoToMeeting's privacy-enhancing features.

Since WebEx, like Microsoft, comes to the small-biz game after playing for a while in the enterprise league, it's important to note MeetMeNow's basis as a completely separate product from its enterprise-class Web meeting products. On one hand, this is no surprise, given the fact that WebEx built MeetMeNow using acquired and mostly unchanged technology; more to the point, it's one of the reasons why MeetMeNow is an exceptionally simple and easy-to-use product. On the other hand, besides a limited feature set, there's also no direct upgrade path to the other WebEx products--not a major pain, but worth noting for firms that may initially assume otherwise.