Product Review: Web Conferencing
The Web Conferencing Review
Multimedia conferencing and
collaboration packages come in many
variations. In this report, we examine three
such services.
Rob Smithers is CEO of Miercom, East
Windsor, N.J. Martin Milner is a senior
industry analyst at Miercom. Miercom (
www.miercom.com)
is a lab testing partner with Communications
News.
by Rob Smithers and Martin Milner
Conferencing and collaboration products that
bring together the company and its remote
agents, be they customers, suppliers or
employees, once more find themselves at the
top of the enterprise agenda because of the
challenges presented by company travel.
Growth in the sector is such that Gartner
now estimates that, by 2011, Web
conferencing will be available to 75 percent
of corporate users as a standard utility,
alongside e-mail, presence, calendaring and
instant messaging (IM).
The adoption of conferencing solutions
has also seen an increase because of an
annual price decline of between 10 percent
and 15 percent in the Web conferencing
services market, a factor not missed by
companies currently building hybrid
conferencing solutions. Traditionally, Web
conferencing has been used for sales and
marketing purposes, as well as training and
customer support, which together account for
almost 75 percent of use. Using Web
conferencing for general meetings is
beginning to take off, contributing 28
percent of all usage in 2007, according to
Frost and Sullivan’s North American Web
Conferencing Services report, published in
July 2008.
Conferencing and collaboration products
accelerate and enhance human collaboration
by:
- saving time, compressing project
schedules and timelines;
- reducing travel expenses by
virtually connecting team members
locally and globally;
- making phone tag a thing of the past
through broadcast messages that can be
picked up once a user returns to the
computer or IM systems enhanced with
presence functionality; and
- improving overall productivity by
keeping people connected, collaborating
and working.
Additional business benefits include more
robust project monitoring with scheduling
and organizational features that also
facilitate the creation of teams and their
assignment, and by accelerating feedback
into processes leading to improved decision
making.
Subject matter experts can be identified
and accessed more quickly, and questions can
be answered without having to wait for a
return e-mail or a telephone call.
Conferencing and collaboration products can
also improve customer satisfaction by
enhancing the overall quality of a product
or service.
In August 2008, an invitation was issued
to conferencing companies to participate in
a review that examines the current state of
conferencing. Miercom evaluated three
companies’ conferencing and collaboration
products, all of which offer the previously
mentioned benefits and advantages. Each also
brings something of their own to the
conferencing and collaboration table. The
companies and their products are Great
America Networks Conferencing QuickVisuals,
Genesys Conferencing’s Genesys Meeting
Center and Avaya’s Meeting Exchange.
GANC QuickVisuals
QuickVisuals from Great America Networks
Conferencing displays six active webcam
windows.
With its QuickVisuals service, Great America
Networks Conferencing (GANC) offers all of
the features expected of a conferencing
platform, including 100 percent
browser-based videoconferencing with true
voice-over-IP (VoIP) audio and text chat. In
addition, GANC provides some features that
are not common among other service
offerings, including:
- a dedicated conferencing consultant
for every account, with a direct number
for live help;
- the capability of recording and
archiving a presentation, without having
to set up a custom player;
- the ability to control the screen
resolution of presenters and attendees;
and
- video capabilities (not always
available in competitive products),
including the ability to show video in
up to 12 webcam windows, with VoIP to
100 participants.
In addition, conference attendees do not
need to download, install and configure any
software, although the presenter does need
to make a one-time download. Participants
need only a Web browser and Flash to attend
a meeting, which, for additional
flexibility, can be hosted from computers
with Windows, Mac or Linux operating
systems.
GANC is able to offer competitive rates
because of its internal setup and
infrastructure, which it owns, and,
therefore, can pass on the benefits. Having
a fully redundant, reliable network that
includes a Compunetix conferencing platform
housed in a carrier colocation facility,
GANC has access to multiple power grids, UPS
backup systems and long-term generators. For
the online user, security is assured via
RTMP/RTMPT/RTMPS protocols.
For company-wide rollouts, an account
manager works with the client company to
ensure the implementation is both simple and
controlled; training sessions are included
for new users of all GANC products and
services.
Genesys Meeting Center
Genesys Conferencing’s Meeting Center shows
the status of meeting participants and a
floating video panel.
Available in many different languages,
Genesys Conferencing provides a highly
featured multimedia conferencing and
collaboration service. Its Meeting Center
service underwent a major transition
(Release 4.0) of service to 100 percent
standards-compliant AJAX (faster on slower
machines and provides for more dynamic Web
pages) at the beginning of 2007. Also
included were improvements in presence, the
use of corporate directories, calendar
features and a move to dedicated media
servers to improve scalability and allow the
deployment of further services.
Genesys notes that within enterprise
environments, there is an emphasis on
applications-sharing technologies and the
means to manage calls and meetings, with the
aim of making meetings a more true-to-life
and richer experience for the end-user.
According to the company, hybrid
conferencing developments are growing,
initially within the Web conferencing area,
but Genesys is sure this will start to
impact audio conferencing. In many
situations, an enterprise has its own
on-premise equipment, often an IP PBX and
related equipment brought together to build
a unified communications system, but still
uses an outside service for conferencing and
collaboration. An example is the use of
Microsoft Office Communications Server
combined with enterprise IM and Intercall’s
services for audio and Web conferencing
purposes. Gartner, in its Web Conferencing
Magic Quadrant, estimates that by 2011 40
percent of all Web conferences will be
operated using on-premise deployments.
With growth in the area of
reservationless conferencing and in
extending conferencing and collaboration to
mobile devices, the Genesys Meeting Center
now works with the Apple iPhone and its
Safari browser.
Genesys’ development strategy has been to
integrate with as many different tools as
possible, mainly IM clients and calendaring
applications, in day-to-day use within the
larger enterprise to increase office
productivity and to offer more integration
with UC products.
Avaya Meeting Exchange
Avaya’s Meeting Exchange Enterprise’s
integration with Microsoft, IBM Lotus Notes
and Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional
environments shows participants and status,
presentations and videos.
Avaya’s Meeting Exchange Enterprise
combines audio conferencing with other
collaboration tools. It makes possible
reservationless and scheduled conferencing
and provides options for managing an audio
conference. Users can share their desktops
and applications, push presentation slides,
access IM capabilities, associate an audio
link to a name and see a participant’s icon
change as their line is muted/unmuted. Users
also can add streaming point-to-point video
to an audio call, without requiring any
special tools for the recipient.
Avaya sees Meeting Exchange as an
important part of its overall UC portfolio,
and one of Avaya’s UC clients, One-X Portal,
integrates with Meeting Exchange, allowing
invite and participant control features
directly from the UC interface.
The service can be deployed in either a
time-division multiplexing (TDM) or IP
environment. In an IP environment, it works
with Avaya’s S6200 media servers, whose
SIP-based architecture has been designed to
support the Meeting Exchange application.
The S6200 allows enterprises to set up many
different types of conferences, from
reservationless to Web, and the Avaya Web
Conferencing application provides conference
recording, customizable reporting, billing,
presence and IM functionality.
Meeting Exchange can scale to support
unlimited users (for audio only) and 32,000
users for audio and Web.
Among the solution’s features:
- an integrated participant roster for
controlling the actions of both audio
and Web participants;
- the ability to dial out to add
participants to a conference;
- the ability to promote and demote
participants within a conference; and
- recording at the touch of a button.
Avaya has two main objectives with its
Meeting Exchange product: Keep it simple and
easy to use, and increase the level of
integration it offers.
Where possible, the Avaya system offers
the means to invoke particular functions,
including clicking, selecting, dragging and
dropping, providing visual clues for the
user and allowing the system to be managed
in more than one way. For example, it offers
the ability to mute cell phone conference
attendees with noisy phones.
Meeting Exchange allows users to:
- initiate reservationless conferences
at a moment’s notice;
- maintain account profiles, schedule
meetings and manage conference
participants during a call;
- record conferences for future
playback; and
- manage high-touch event conferences
using the Bridge-Talk feature, which
combines multiple, discrete bridges into
one for the purpose of a meeting with a
long attendee list.
Meeting Exchange fits in with most
products that are used on a daily basis and
with which enterprise users are familiar.
Increased integration will, according to
Avaya, make conferencing a natural extension
to using a phone or participating in a phone
conference.
Integration with Avaya Web Conferencing
gives the product a full-featured Web
collaboration capability, and a lightweight
directory access protocol integration option
lets the product work with a company’s
existing contact directories.
Conferencing Trends
As enterprises become more distributed
and global in their reach, they will
continue to seek ways to communicate more
efficiently, effectively and inexpensively.
The following conferencing and collaboration
trends were noted:
Products continue to merge into single,
integrated solutions that offer
comprehensive communications, conferencing
and collaboration capabilities. There also
has been an increase in hybrid deployments
and a move toward making conferencing and
collaboration more a part of a company’s
overall unified communications solution.
Development and dollars are currently
concentrated in advancing audio quality,
providing more extensive application sharing
and improving meeting control facilities.
More products are providing moveable,
resizable, dockable floating windows (or
power panels) to show video streams or
provide other information to the moderator,
making for a smoother conferencing
experience for attendees, without
interrupting the presentation. The reviewed
vendors state they are incorporating as many
ease-of-use features as possible into their
products, with the goal of providing a
highly functional and seamless experience,
so the user does not need to worry about the
applications that are being used or even
from which company they come.
Finally, conferencing abilities continue
to be extended to a wide range of mobile
devices. The goal of these conferencing
companies is for users to experience no
difference in function, regardless of the
device or method used to join and
participate in a conference.
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