The Webinar Blog

Technology Can Screw Up Your Webinar!

2009-11-12T14:23:29-05:00

I just gave a public webinar as a guest speaker for Adobe. At the end of the session, I gave the audience several easy to type, easy to remember URL names to do things like provide feedback or socialize after the session. I tested them immediately prior to the event to make sure they worked.

Of course when we got to the end of my session and it was time to use those URLs, they didn’t work. I didn’t know what was going on and incorrectly attributed the problem to Adobe’s technology.

PUBLIC APOLOGY: ADOBE WAS NOT AT FAULT. THEIR TECHNOLOGY WORKED PERFECTLY.

I want to make that clear, because there may have been attendees evaluating web conferencing solutions who got the wrong impression.

The problem was with the name server forwarding service I used to redirect my short, convenient URLs to the longer formal URL destinations. The forwarding broke down and never connected with the actual destination site.

Again, THIS HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH ADOBE.

I hope attendees see this message and separate the web conferencing, which worked like a charm throughout the session, from the domain name stuff – which was a completely separate third party solution.

My lesson is twofold… One, every time you introduce another link in a technology chain you have an opportunity for something else to fail – even when you have tested it right before your event. I could have had a backup handy to provide the full, long format URLs for the audience. But I didn’t, so those post-event utilities became useless. Bad planning on my part.

Two, if you don’t know what has failed or why, don’t make guesses and assumptions. I probably harmed Adobe’s reputation and chance of extending their sales to the attendees at this session. That’s inexcusable for a guest speaker. I hope this notice helps a bit.

Technorati Tags: Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro,Adobe,webinar,web seminar,web meeting,online seminar,online meeting,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing

Making Webinars More Like In-Person Meetings

2009-11-11T00:20:14-05:00

This Thursday (November 12) I’ll be back as guest speaker on Adobe’s eLuminary series of educational webcasts. My topic will be “Making Your Webinars More Like In-Person Meetings.”

As always with Adobe, the session is free and they don’t eat up the session time with a bunch of self-promotional marketing material. If you want to find out more about their webinar technology, you can attend a separate breakout session after the educational content is complete. I also promise not to waste your time with marketing hype. This is real material you can use to improve your business webinars.

The session should last for one hour, starting at 10am USA Pacific / 1pm USA Eastern. I’ve included plenty of time for audience questions. Here’s a link to time zone conversions for locations around the world.

Technorati Tags: Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro,webinar,web seminar,web meeting,online meeting,online seminar,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing

QA About Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro

2009-11-05T16:27:12-05:00

Gary wrote in with a rather long comment on my last post about Adobe’s latest release of Connect Pro. He asked a number of thought provoking questions and I thought I would answer in a new post rather than getting into a comments discussion. Here is Gary’s full comment:

Hello Ken, I've been using Adobe Connect Pro ever since it was called Macromedia Breeze. It's been really interesting watching the platform grow and the option to bridge a teleconference line and VoIP is a big step forward and I can't wait until Adobe builds the functionality to have two way conversations no matter how the user chooses to connect. Something GoTo has been able to accomplish first and in a better way. One of the things I've always thought Adobe/Macromedia needed to improve was the marketing of the platform as being customizable with respect to the pods that can be created. I think the user exchange that was created awhile ago was a good first step, but I'm dumbfounded as to why Adobe hasn't cultivated/highlighted that community, kinda like app stores for smartphones. As far as I know, no other webinar platforms allow for this sort of customization and is a huge selling point that's not being exploited. A few questions: Do you know of other platforms that allow for the creation of truly customized applications to run within the platform and allows for synchronization (or not, depending on the type of interaction needed) between all users? What are your thoughts on a Connect pod store and the implications for Adobe's bottom line if it were to truly get behind the idea? Do you think the potential for widespread use of smartphones (Once Flashplayer 10 drops) will affect how webinars are conducted or will the adoption rate be so slow and user interface too limited to have an impact? Thanks.

Wow. I’d better take things one at a time. Standard disclaimers first… I have no financial or business interests that bias me for or against Adobe or any of its competitors. They do regularly invite me to be a guest speaker on their public webinar series, but I have been a guest speaker for Citrix, ReadyTalk, Arkadin, ON24, and others as well. I don’t resell customer licenses for Adobe’s software or any others. And I have no special insider information about confidential product plans or strategies. That said, I use the software quite a bit and count it as one of the top tier entrants in the web seminar technology space.

I agree that Adobe’s pod and layout customization is a huge product differentiator that the company has never seemed to market or promote heavily. I’m as puzzled as you are, Gary! An experienced meeting host/administrator can completely change the look and functionality of the conferencing console for presenters and attendees, switching back and forth between layouts that serve particular functional or cosmetic needs. That’s very impressive and rare. Because pods are effectively Flash applications in themselves, they can be programmed for dedicated functionality that is sometimes surprising. And customers can upload Flash applications to run inside of generic pods without needing any additional programming.

A number of other vendors are starting to embrace the Flash platform as the underpinning for their products, which will give them an opportunity to enable similar flexibility. omNovia (the capitalization is theirs) is Flash based and recently added the ability to upload customer-provided Flash applications as meeting content. I just started looking at Voxwire, and the first glance cosmetics of the meeting room are almost 100% identical to Connect Pro, with movable and shapeable content pods. As a matter of fact, it’s so close that I wonder about the potential for litigation, but I’m no Intellectual Property lawyer.

Adobe has a head start on applications that are built specifically to run as pods inside their meetings. They offer documentation to developers and have a Software Development Kit for third parties to use in extending functionality. Their online Connect Pro Exchange offers dozens of add-on functions for free download. I’ve used some of these in my own sessions. I know of at least one company making a commercial venture out of selling fancy add-ons for meeting pods (RefinedData Solutions).

Is pod functionality and customization viable as a serious business model? I don’t know about that. Your analogy to app stores for Smartphones doesn’t match in terms of unit sales volumes and usage patterns. Adobe has concentrated heavily on the Enterprise conferencing market. Corporate data managers and IT departments are not too keen about their users loading up lord-knows-what inside collaborative technology solutions that expose synchronous connections inside and outside of the company network. And honestly, most web conferencing users don’t want to concentrate that hard on the framework. They just want to run a meeting and display their content. The less time spent configuring, the better. There will always be some of us conferencing geeks who enjoy tweaking things, but we represent a very small percentage of the web conferencing user base.

Finally, you asked my personal take on the impact of mobile access to web conferences. I’m cynical about the real impact, but that’s not going to stop a huge marketing push touting the functionality. Public wireless data speeds to mobile devices have a long way to go before they match the high speed connectivity that web conferencing vendors rely on for things like simultaneous live video, application sharing, and audio streaming. Business users are still creating awful PowerPoint slides for their presentations that cram text and data into tiny dense blocks that are hard enough to read on a full desktop monitor... Attendees will be even more frustrated when seeing these on 3-inch screens. I predict that mobile access will have an actual usage rate far below the hype and press that it gets over the next couple of years.

And with that, I’ll put the cloth back on my crystal ball. The comments section is open for other viewpoints, arguments, and questions!

Technorati Tags: Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro,Connect Pro,omNovia,Voxwire,web conferencing,web conference,web seminar,webinar,online seminar,online meeting,webcasting,webcast

Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro Gets An Update

2009-11-03T07:23:20-05:00

Adobe has announced the latest version of their web conferencing software, Connect Pro 7.5. New customers and trial accounts start using it immediately. Customers who license and install the software on premises can get the new version shipped to them as desired. And customers running on hosted (SaaS) accounts will be migrated to the new version over the following weeks as Adobe updates a server at a time.

I got a briefing and a demo ahead of time. There are a variety of enhancements along with the expected bug fixes that all software manufacturers add to upgrade releases. I’ll try to break down some of the more significant items.

The single biggest convenience enhancement for me is the addition of a software-enabled audio bridge. This allows you to connect to any third-party teleconference call and have the sound from that call piped through the streaming audio interface in the web conference so that participants can listen over their computer speakers. If they have problems with their computer sound, they can always call in on the telephone. Offering a choice of computer and telephone audio is one of my best practices for webinars, and this makes it a lot easier to accomplish. Before this release, you had to hard-wire your telephone to the microphone input of your PC to bridge the audio from an arbitrary teleconference.

Adobe’s implementation lets you preconfigure dial-out numbers and code sequences (including hard-coded pauses to account for voice prompts) with your account. You then associate a web meeting with the call configuration you want to use for that session. Adobe is talking about the possibility of expanding the functionality in the future. They foresee being able to someday bring not only voice, but other media such as video from a videoconference call into the web meeting. They may also look at incorporating two-way audio functionality at some point. Currently, web participants can hear anything said on the phone, but if somebody uses a computer microphone to speak in the web conference, phone listeners won’t hear them.

Connect Pro has been useful for meeting sizes of up to a few hundred attendees when using the hosted version and maybe around 1500 if using a carefully configured on-premises license. Adobe saw the the need to smoothly host very large meetings, such as major corporate announcements or investor calls and has added a new option for these kinds of massive audience events. “Connect Pro Webcast” is said to scale for audiences of up to 80,000. It offers a somewhat more limited set of functionality than the standard Connect Pro version. I’m still trying to get a feature-to-feature comparison list between the versions, but it should at least allow for participants to submit questions, download slides, and answer polls. The Webcast version is only available as a bundled purchase with a full event services package and is expected to be purchased on an event-by-event basis, since it is overkill for standard meetings. [UPDATE: Adobe responded with an email that the main limitation is no "share pod" for generalized collaborative information sharing. It uses a specialized slide display mechanism instead.]

One of the new features in release 7.5 fascinated me, as I had never thought about the need. Organizations can configure their accounts so that meeting hosts and presenters are only allowed to show certain approved applications when running a desktop sharing session. So a law firm might let employees share PowerPoint and Excel, but the software would automatically block the display of Outlook and Instant Messenger windows. No more embarrassing or confidential information accidentally showing up in your meeting when you fire up desktop sharing mode! Currently, you can only “white list” applications. In other words, the administrator has to explicitly allow applications to be shared. Anything not approved is automatically blocked. I can foresee customer requests for the opposite functionality, letting administrators “black list” applications that should never be shown, but allowing anything else the presenter might want to share.

Other announcements are less about specific in-conference features. Customers now have the option to purchase a “managed services” contract that lets them run a local on-premise copy of the software application, but have Adobe manage all installation, updates, and maintenance. And Adobe formally announced intent to support meeting participation from mobile devices, starting with (surprise) Apple iPhone and iPod Touch. There is no public availability forecast however. You can also upload a PDF document into a meeting room as a supported file type (like Flash or PowerPoint), giving you the ability to scale the content as the window size changes and work with the content more organically.

As soon as my hosted account gets upgraded, I’ll do some additional in-room testing to check on bug fixes and “idiosyncrasies” that have been well documented in the user forums. I was told that PowerPoint 2007 (.PPTX) support has been improved. But it looks like Adobe still can’t get licensing issues sorted out for Microsoft’s Calibri and Corbel fonts, leaving us frustrated with PowerPoint uploads and conversions when working with the latest Microsoft products.

Technorati Tags: Adobe,Connect Pro,Acrobat Connect,web conferencing,web conference,webinar,webcasting,webcast,web seminar,web meeting,online meeting,online seminar

Comparing Web Conferencing Software

2009-10-28T04:53:53-04:00

Jim wrote in and asked “What’s a good source to compare the various web conferencing applications before choosing one?”

This is a question I have addressed in the past, but it’s worth talking about again, as it is one of the most repeated queries on this blog. The short answer is that I don’t know of any trusted, all in one source for comparing web conferencing applications on an equal basis.

The closest you’ll get is Publicare’s site: webconferencing-test.com. It gives you some criteria they selected for making a rating system and points you toward some very usable software.

Problem number one (for my blog focus) is that Publicare chose to “focus on online conferencing solutions for smaller and medium-sized companies and the self-employed.” These tend to be less expensive solutions designed primarily for peer-level collaborative meetings. That is a valid niche, and I’m not knocking their choice of focus. But you need to be aware that it leaves out web conferencing packages targeted at large structured web seminars or training sessions where the focus is on presenters providing information to an audience.

Problem number two is that all rating systems have a built in bias towards the criteria that the tester chooses to emphasize. Those criteria might not meet your priorities for product selection.

Problem number three is that many of the big web conferencing vendors have multiple versions of their software. Adobe, iLinc, and WebEx are just some of the big recognizable names that license distinct versions of their software designed for small events, large events, eLearning, or support. Which version do you choose for your comparison?

Problem number four is that you are dealing with a moving target. The vendors update their software all the time. With web conferencing commonly licensed as a hosted SaaS solution, the programs can (and do) get upgrades whenever the vendor feels like it. These are sometimes not even announced publicly!

Problem number five is that there just isn’t a strong business return for the poor shlub who is thinking about doing the work. If you accept advertising from the vendors on your site, your testing objectivity comes into question. You spend an enormous amount of time testing and writing up results, then spend the rest of your life retesting and updating and answering challenges from vendors and users. And every new piece of software that comes along wants you to add them to the review list. It’s a major commitment if you plan to take it seriously.

I wrote up a blog post a year ago on “My Favorite Webinar Technologies.” That was a snapshot in time, and it is now out of date. I have been using omNovia quite a lot lately with excellent results, and it would be high in my list. InstantPresenter got a major update, and I like it much more now (coming in first place for fee-based events). I haven’t tested iLinc lately, and I know they have had updates. Connect Pro actually slipped a bit because of some slide conversion problems that I found frustrating.

I try to keep this blog updated with mini-reviews of various webinar products from time to time as well as key announcements when I find out about upgrades that affect usability. But I’m the first to say that I don’t use a structured approach and it’s not very useful for vendor to vendor comparisons. Given that this is a non-revenue activity for me, I’m afraid the haphazard nature is likely to continue. In the meantime, let me point you to a series of articles I wrote on Webinar Wire where I talk about some of the major webinar features and how vendors implement them in different ways. You can go to the site and do a search on “features”.

If you find a comparison site I don’t know about, please let me know and I’ll publicize it for everyone to use!

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,web meeting,online seminar,web conference,web conferencing,webcasting,webcast

Creating Exceptional Lead Gen Webinars

2009-10-24T23:29:36-04:00

MarketingProfs is offering a free white paper written by Joel Granoff entitled “9 Management Practices for Exceptional Webinars.” This paper is a must-read for enterprise marketers (particularly B2B) who plan to or currently use webinars to gather sales leads.

I can’t praise the paper highly enough. In only 26 pages of clear, readable text, Joel gives incredibly valuable information that can be applied immediately to your company’s marketing webinar programs. He starts with some basic background demographics on the companies studied in a marketplace survey. One of the statistics I found interesting is that 72% of respondents said they have been conducting webinars for three years or less. This shows both the rapid uptake in webinars as a business tool in recent years and the incredible potential still untapped.

As Joel moves into his nine key management practices, I found myself nodding in agreement at each of his practical recommendations and suggestions for integrating webinars as part of a complete business sales/marketing program.

He wraps up with some specific checklists to help guide you through the process of evaluating technology vendors, managing the registration and lead tracking process, and calculating ROI for your webinars.

Go. Download this white paper. Do it now.

[In case you were wondering, I have no connection with MarketingProfs or Joel Granoff. They didn’t contact me about the paper and have no idea I saw it or am writing about it. I saw it promoted in a public press release. Boy, are you cynical!]

Technorati Tags: MarketingProfs,marketing,Joel Granoff,lead generation,webinar,web seminar,online seminar,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing

Web Conferencing News Roundup

2009-10-22T00:11:00-04:00

This is one of those weeks when many web conferencing vendors coincidentally came out with newsworthy announcements and developments within a short time. When that happens, I like to call special attention to the burst of activity with a news roundup. Of course you can always follow press releases and articles hand-picked to reflect items of interest to our little community on the Webinar Success Industry News page.

Mediasite by Sonic Foundry occupies an interesting niche in the web conferencing space. It is particularly well suited for “simulcasting” a local presentation (particularly classroom training) to a remote audience. The company released version 5.2 with updated features for managing the recording process during the capture of a presentation, the ability to use uploaded video clips, and keyword searching through captioned presentations to find a particular point in a recording where the content references an item of interest.

Elluminate has also been placing a lot of focus on distance learning and education applications of its web collaboration technology. The company acquired Edtuit, creators of LearnCentral – a social learning network. This gives Elluminate a broader platform for clients who want to bundle structured and ad hoc web conferencing sessions with collaboration and networking features designed specifically for education and training.

ViVu officially released the first commercial version of its video-oriented webcasting and collaboration product, offering the ability to support extremely large video-enabled audiences.

ReadyTalk’s new embeddable media player (released earlier this month) won a People’s Choice Award at a Colorado technology association conference.

iLinc was recognized as “App of the Week” by AppExchange for the usefulness of its iLinc for Salesforce direct integration of web conferencing information such as event registration and attendance with the Salesforce CRM database.

Arkadin announced a new pricing model that simplifies budgeting for combined audio and web conferencing services from the company.

Web meetings conducted with Saba Centra can now be accessed using an Apple iPhone.

And finally, I’d like to mention a piece of news with importance that may not be immediately obvious to my American readers. The Indian government just changed a policy affecting web conferencing vendors. Firms offering teleconference and web conference services in India can now be 100% foreign owned (after approval by India’s Foreign Investment Promotion Board). Previously, companies had to show more than one-quarter investment ownership by Indian concerns. This will help open the massive Indian market to more American companies, and possibly smaller vendors who could not afford to create India-based subsidiaries. Premiere Global forced the issue, and stands to be the first web conferencing provider to benefit. Web conferencing adoption in India and China is still in infancy stages relative to the huge business market potential. Vendors should be salivating over any improvement in their chances of grabbing a piece of this pie.

These are exciting times for web conferencing and collaboration!

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,web meeting,online seminar,online meeting,web collaboration,online collaboration,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing

Your Presentation Slides Still Stink

2009-10-20T23:18:37-04:00

Dave Paradi just published the results of his fourth survey on which PowerPoint presentation characteristics annoy audiences the most. Here are the top five – in order of unpopularity – culled from more than 540 responses:

The speaker read the slides to us
Text so small I couldn’t read it
Full sentences instead of bullet points
Slides hard to see because of color choice
Overly complex diagrams or charts

Dave goes into more detail on his survey and the results, and will be following up on his blog with a discussion of respondent comments.

Professionals in the presentation industry have been evangelizing against these common design and delivery flaws for years. Apparently to no effect. See how easy it is to make your webinar presentations stand out from the garbage that your audiences dread, yet have come to expect? Even after all these years, you still have the opportunity to be cutting edge and a trendsetter, simply by ceasing to treat your slide show as a “Books On Tape” performance.

Presentation slides should lend visual emphasis and support to your vocal presentation. If your slides tell the entire story, the audience doesn’t need you. They certainly don’t need to spend 60 minutes listening to you read something they could read much more quickly.

Each slide should distill and quickly convey a single idea at a glance. You can probably explain the concept in the title area alone! Use visual cues to build a connection to your verbal material. If you use data to support your message, do the inferential work for your audience... Instead of showing them data, show them information. Clearly and obviously highlight the point the data supports.

Raw numbers, tables, and detailed graphs have a place in the business world. They are necessary for doing due diligence, learning how to draw conclusions, and acting as archival reference information. But in a group presentation, they distract and detract from the power of your message.

A well-written white paper has great value. But slapping it onto a bunch of PowerPoint slides doesn’t make it a presentation, and doesn’t transfer the value to a live audience. They deserve better. You can do better. Let Dave’s dissatisfied minions be your guide!

Technorati Tags: Dave Paradi,PowerPoint,presentations,webinar,web seminar,webcasting,webcast,online seminar,online presentation,web conference,web conferencing

InstantPresenter Integrates PayPal

2009-10-14T02:05:51-04:00

It has been ages since I looked at InstantPresenter web conferencing. Back several years ago, I thought it was a little underpowered compared to the competition. I’m happy to report that they have been making improvements behind my back, and it’s working very nicely now!

The immediate reason I took another look was a press release stating that InstantPresenter had integrated payment processing directly into the software so that you can charge for your webinars and webcasts. This is still extremely uncommon in the web conferencing technology space, and I wanted to see how it worked.

It turns out to be simplicity itself. You need to have an active PayPal account already set up and verified for accepting payments. That’s free and easy to do directly through PayPal. PayPal has become the de facto payment processor of choice on the Internet, and it lets customers submit payments without sharing their private financial information with you.

As you schedule an upcoming webinar in InstantPresenter, you simply indicate whether you want to charge registrants. If so, you type in your PayPal account identifier (your email address) and set up the charge amounts. InstantPresenter was clever enough to allow you to create up to three discount codes and associated prices. You can also charge a different amount for watching the live webinar versus accessing the recording later.

As customers register for your event, they are taken into the secure PayPal system to pay, and they get an automated confirmation from the system. The full payment amount goes directly into your account… InstantPresenter does not skim any amount for themselves (although PayPal does).

This makes InstantPresenter immediately attractive for small businesses, consultants, and trainers who want to charge clients for their expertise, but do not have the time, skills, or resources to build online shopping carts and API connections to web conferencing software. It should be a big hit (and I hope will inspire other vendors to set up similar functionality).

I’m not going to go through a detailed review of the rest of the functionality here, but I can report that the software now supports PowerPoint animations and slide transitions (yay!), allows customizable registration forms and post-event surveys, and with a small optional fee you can bridge third-party teleconference lines to the streaming audio to give attendees their choice of how to listen. You can also let registrants choose their own login password for a webinar, which can help cut down on unauthorized access to paid events.

The system runs in Flash, and I’d like to give special recognition to whatever software engineer programmed the initial connection screens for InstantPresenter. They have the best, clearest explanations I have ever seen for how to handle browser prompts for allowing access and clicking confirmations. I can’t imagine an attendee being confused or frightened by the security access prompts that we are all slaves to now.

InstantPresenter is definitely worth putting on your short list when evaluating webinar technology vendors. If you are charging for your events, it should be one of the first ones you test.

Technorati Tags: InstantPresenter,webinar,web seminar,web meeting,online seminar,online meeting,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing

ViVu Concentrates on Group Video Webcasts

2009-10-14T01:37:21-04:00

ViVu is a new webcast technology company that just announced investment funding to get its first commercial release to market. I had a chance to work with the software in a video chat with the company’s management team, and also did a bit of testing using the free trial on their website.

The central focus of ViVu is on connecting audiences where everybody has a video and sound connection. The software has a unique interface that lets you see thumbnail images of an entire room full of participants, even when that number is in the hundreds or thousands. It displays a view that is supposed to be analogous to what you would see when standing on a stage looking out into a crowded room. So the first rows are larger and clearer, with farther rows smaller and less distinct. But unlike in a real auditorium, you can click to focus on any row. You can also see when someone has a question or requests the floor and optionally open their microphone.

The software is Flash and Java based, running in most major browsers and operating systems without the need for downloads and installs. However participants are given a popup suggestion to load a High Quality Streaming Video add-in, which takes a few minutes to download and install. This raises the smoothness and responsiveness of the video.

When I initially installed the HQ encoder in our demonstration video chat, I saw good smooth quality on my high speed cable modem connection. But in further tests at home, I ran into problems getting a quality video feed to my second computer. Images showed a great deal of pixilation and about a 1.5 second lag in motion responsiveness. I couldn’t get the checkbox option to load the HQ encoder, so it’s unclear what was happening. [UPDATE: There was a control button for installing the HQ encoder on the host computer that I didn't find when trying out the software. It looks like an electrical plug with a red X on it and is unlabeled. I thought it would end the session! I have tried loading the encoder during a session and ran into some error messages during the install followed by an inability to show any video. I'll work with their support tomorrow and report on the resolution. UPDATE 2: It looks like my problem was a Vista security block that kept their install program from running automatically. They sent me the install file and I was able to run it from my desktop as an administrator. Everything is working and the video with the HQ encoder installed is much faster and smoother. No pixilation in the image. The video lag between North Carolina and California was approximately one second.]

One quirk that quickly grew exasperating was a random tendency to flash a title bar in a big bold strip across the speaker’s video. By default it just says “HOST”, although you can change it to the person’s name (or any other fun title you want to make up). The title bar comes and goes, and is always tremendously distracting. [UPDATE: ViVu says they are making changes to this behavior.]

In addition to live audio and video, ViVu lets you upload graphic files for display, recorded video clips, and PowerPoint decks. I uploaded my PowerPoint Torture Test and found that the converter they use had a few problems. It misconverted some text fonts and one gradient fill on a shape. The converter also ignores animation effects and slide transitions, so you need to plan on using a static image presentation. I was slightly annoyed that as the presenter, I saw overlay controls on top of my slide content. You lose visibility of an entire band along the bottom of your slide, along with some space at the top. I’d like to see them move those controls off the active content area of the slides. This does not affect the audience’s view however. [UPDATE: I'm really red-faced about this one. I simply didn't check an option box to retain animations during the upload process. With the option selected, slide transitions and animations worked very well! It also fixed the color gradient conversion problem I noted in the static upload. There was a commonly-seen problem with not converting certain text fonts, but overall it did a very good job. Sorry about that, ViVu!]

The software lets you publish polls for audience response in either single answer or “choose all that apply” formats. You can list up to five choices. Once again I had some difficulties in getting the poll to appear on my second computer in a meeting. When you run into troubles of this sort, it can be a bit frustrating, as there is no online help either in the meeting or on the company website.

I also tested out the screen sharing capabilities, which are limited to showing your entire desktop – There is no facility for selecting a single application or user-defined area. In my testing, lag times were 15 seconds on most movements, making them extremely impractical for most types of live demonstrations. [UPDATE: ViVu says this is most likely because I was running both the host and attendee computer off the same home router, overloading my local circuitry. I'll try a remote network test when I can. But I have to say that this is my standard test procedure for web conferencing technologies. UPDATE 2: I tested screen sharing with another network. Lag time was approximately four seconds, which is much better. Not as good as the best in the industry, but that is not the company's focus, and it is good enough for occasional use.]

There is an open chat functionality, letting all participants view and type messages. You cannot switch it to a “webinar mode” (my term), where only presenters and facilitators can see incoming messages.

As a host, you have the option of scheduling a meeting for a specified date and time or starting one on an ad hoc basis. You can send invitations and optionally require attendees to use a password.

The CEO, Sudha Valluru, said that they have stress tested the technology with a simulated 10,000-user meeting, so scaling should not be a problem. [UPDATE: Bad reporting here... That was not a stress test, but a live event with 10,000 participants for the AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford. UPDATE 2: There were 10,000 participants cumulative over the entire multi-day event. Maximum simultaneous connections were a few thousand, and ViVu says they saw no signs of performance degradation.]

Licensing models include monthly unlimited use subscriptions (listed on their site as $49.95/month) and enterprise licenses, which allow branding and customization as well as larger numbers of hosts and participants.

As I noted, this initial launch includes some of the inevitable teething pains found in complex software solutions. But once ViVu gets some additional support resources online and smoothes out some of the rough edges, this should fit in nicely with the growing business interest in video-centric conferencing capabilities.

Technorati Tags: Vivu,Sudha Valluru,webcasting,webcast,webinar,web seminar,web meeting,online meeting,video meeting,video collaboration,videoconference,web conference,web conferencing