Comprehensive Web Conferencing at a Great Price

Cisco's WebEx web conferencing and desktop sharing solution is a strong and straightforward application that allows you to easily collaborate with coworkers and customers quickly and easily.

Solution Highlights:

• Comprehensive web conferencing and collaboration solution
• Has all the features you need, and doesn't bury you under features you don't need
• True multi-source video conferencing
• Integrated VOIP and free toll conferencing options; optional toll free and dial out capabilities
• SaaS based offering utilizing the Cisco WebEx Collaboration Cloud
• Standard service meets most companies' needs at a great price

Description:

Cisco's WebEx web conferencing and desktop sharing solution is a strong and straightforward application that allows you to easily collaborate with coworkers and customers quickly and easily.

The WebEx applications are delivered on demand as Software as a Service (SaaS), and utilize the Cisco WebEx Collaboration Cloud which provides better than 99.99% reliability and a hi-level of security to its users.

Their core offering is the WebEx Meeting Center, which gives you a single meeting room capable of supporting 25 simultaneous users.  Presenters can share prepared presentations, uploaded documents, or any application running on the host's desktop, allowing everything from streamlined sales presentation to intensive collaboration on important documents.

With WebEx you can schedule meetings ahead of time in your meeting center and send out invitations for your presentation, or create one on the fly for a quick review of a spreadsheet.  Once you've started the meeting, you have the option of creating slides on the fly, uploading a document (which can be viewed, but not edited) or sharing an application or your entire desktop, allowing your participants to watch or even take control of your computer.  (There's also an integrated web browser in the application, but it's not very robust—it lacks even the basic protection of a pop-up blocker, and any browser side scripts on viewed pages seem to throw the application into fits.  If you need to view a web page that was created after the blink tag, just share your normal browser.)

The WebEx application includes voice conferencing at no additional charge, either through a built in VOIP client, or a free toll dial in conference phone number—participants can use either method, and don't need to join the data conference to dial in to the audio conference.   You can optionally add a toll free dial in number, which also allows participants to request that the system dial out to them, or for you to dial out to them from inside the conference.  You also have the ability to see which participant is talking (or making too much noise) and mute or unmute lines, as well as remove participants from the conference.

Your participants can use the integrated chat functions to talk as well—as a side bar conversation to avoid interrupting the main flow of the presentation, to ask questions about the presentation, or to report technical issues, for example.  As a presenter, you have the ability to limit or entirely disable the chat function if you want to keep your audience from getting too distracted.

You and your participants can even chat face to face during the conference—the basic meeting center supports up to six participants sending video with web cameras, though bandwidth and screen real estate would quickly become a concern; if you need to see everyone, there are better options available.  Video windows are small and low quality, as well.

As a presenter you have the option of recording a meeting.  This will create a file that captures the data displayed on your screen during the conference, as well as any audio sent by the recording computer (so long as you're using a sound card and microphone jack; USB headsets are not supported for recording, though you can use them in the conference.)  When the meeting is over, you can use additional tools to perform limited editing on the recording, and convert it to other playback formats.  While this might be useful for a simple presentation that you want to share on the web, or recording comments on a document, the audio limitations are a significant drawback to the recording function.

WebEx offers broad compatibility with all major operating systems and both Internet Explorer and Firefox, though the application did crash the first time this user tried to open it in Firefox.  The core desktop sharing application will also work on Mac and UNIX/Linux systems, and you can even view presentations on many smartphones, including the iPhone, and many BlackBerry, Nokia, Android models, as well as any Windows Mobile hardware.  However, many of the add-ons such as Microsoft Outlook and Office integration, the desktop launcher, applications for editing and converting recorded meeting, are Windows or Mac specific. 

The interface for the Cisco WebEx Meeting Center is simple and easy to use.  While it lacks some of the bells and whistles of some competing products, the vast majority of your meetings are going to be for a handful of participants viewing a few slides and documents, and the Meeting Center software provides that. 

If you do need more advanced features, those are available as well: you can add capacity to the basic Meeting Center, and there are several more advanced offerings. 

• WebEx Training Center supports up to 1000 participants, participant break-out sessions, quizzes, and learning management integration, and even has the ability to collect payment from your participants if you provide training as a service. 
• WebEx Event Center increases capacity to 3000 participants, and allows you to create complex invitations and follow-up communications, and offers advance question and answer functions, allowing your next investor relations call to be truly multi-media.  
• Help desk focused packages allow your IT staff to connect to a user's computer to perform maintenance tasks, investigate trouble reports, and train users.

The basic Meeting Center is very well priced, even for the smallest organizations—a single meeting room with a 25 person capacity and integrated audio is only $49 per month.  More advanced features, or bulk discounts on meeting rooms for your company, are quoted on a case by case basis depending on the features you need.  While there is a “by the minute” cost for the basic Meeting Center, it costs $0.33 per participant per minute, with an extra $0.20 charge per participant per minute to add voice options—at that rate, a five participant conference will cost as much as a monthly subscription in only thirty minutes. 

The Bottom Line:

We reccomend that you give the Cisco WebEx web conferencing and desktop sharing solution a try. The price point for WebEx is hard to beat, particularly for small businesses, or even larger companies if only a few people in your organization need to regularly host meetings.  The integrated audio options are a particularly nice feature as many competing services charge extra to have true teleconferencing integration, and their VOIP and bridged solutions don't always work together. Cisco WebEx offers a free 14 day trial of the WebEx Meeting Center with almost every function available, and it's definitely worth checking out.