Desktop video conferencing for remote presentations and file collaboration.
Beam Your Screen is a perfect option if you need to show a remote audience what’s happening on your screen. It’s fairly limited in scope, but is just right for some situations. And because it’s browser-based, your audience doesn’t need to download a client in order to see what you’re doing. The main benefits of Beam Your Screen are as follows: Who’s it for? Beam Your Screen sits in your taskbar and will give you notifications as and when people join your conference. Beam Your Screen gives a lot of options, and an easy way to invite participants. Clicking on ‘Email Session Information’ automatically formats an email that includes all relevant information for anyone wishing to log into your conference. They simply open the link in their browser to see your screen. Choose whether you want to share your whole screen or a single application. Also vary the quality according to your connection speed. You can also record a Beam Your Screen session pretty easily. It won’t upload to a server but you can save it to your hard drive.
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Dimdim’s a lightweight, flash-based collaborative solution that’s available for anyone with a web browser. It’s relatively low-cost and is aimed at small businesses, charities and freelancers. The main advantages are as follows: Wizard-style intro means you can easily start collaborating by sharing your screen, opening a whiteboard or giving a presentation Start your meeting by setting up the name, and choose scheduling options. Lots of options here, especially considering this is web-based. Web meeting in a web browser; video box can be moved around and here we’re using a whiteboard. You’ll also notice there’s a US phone number you can call if you want to use phone instead of built-in microphone. Here we’re sharing a PDF document and annotating with the annotation features. Again, this is all inside the web browser so no client was required for the person I invited to the conference. There’s also the option to record your meeting.
You’ll noticed that for every product we review, we also include a rating. We’ve tried to incorporate the various aspects you’ll be thinking of before you purchase, and the matrix below shows our thoughts behind the various ratings. To keep everything fair, we judge all software by the following criteria:
Category
1 star
2 stars
3 stars
4 stars
5 stars
Ease of use
Requires a lot of training and manual reading
Requires training and some practise
Requires less than one hour training and practise
Can be stared up and confident people could use this straight away
Easy to use and understand
Features
Very minimal
Minimal
Good
Very good, useful features
Full range of useful and unique features
Number of users
Restricted
Adequate
Good
Will accomodate most needs for numbers and not cost too much for additional users.
No/few constraints on number of users allowed
Value for money
Expensive/Overpriced
There are better buys
Reasonably priced
Very good value
Excellent value
Compatibility
Only works with some computesr/systems
Limited compatibility
Works with most software
Works with all software
Works with all operating systems/browsers
Editor’s opinion
Only buy if you’re sure this is what you want.
This is ok, but there are probably better deals
This is the industry average
Above average for collaborative sftare
The best in terms of features, value and ease of use.