Web conferencing is one of my favorite web tools. The ability to share an application or Powerpoint presentation with people in different physical locations is extremely powerful. It's useful to a wide variety of people such as salespeople, trainers, presenters, lawyers and certainly librarians. And most web conferencing services are easy to use, and relatively inexpensive. So what's not to like! Well, more on that later.
PC Magazine reviews the major players in the web conferencing arena, including Webex, Microsoft Office Live Meeting (aka Placeware) and Raindance in Web Conferencing: Take a Meeting Online.
The article is a good feature review. But I wish they had attempted to assess reliability in addition to the bells and whistles. All the features in the world won't help you if the site malfunctions while you have 20 people in different locations waiting to see a screenshot. When problems occur, it's hard to know if the service itself is flaky, or whether the vagaries of the Internet or your own particular network are at fault. I speak from experience, and it's not always pretty. When it's good, it's very very good. When it's bad it's awful.
Let me know what your experiences have been with the different services by sending me an email at cchick at lawlibtech dot com, and I'll post your comments. (I have temporarily turned off the comment feature due to a recent comment spamming incident, but send your comments to me, and I'll make sure they're added.)
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