The main benefits of Beam Your Screen are as follows:

• Show anybody what’s going on your screen (i.e. any application/website/document)
• Browser based – no need to download a separate client
• Conference bridging facility; people can ring into the meeting, phone number provided
• Easy to create and send invitations
• Very simple to use
• Annotation tools
• Launch from your task-bar
• Record conferences
• Beam Your Screen to up to 25 participants

Who’s it for?

• Delivering remote training (especially training on new software or IT)
• Screencasts
• Webinars

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.

• Q&A shows who asked the question, as well as any text response given by other attendees.
• Reply publicly or privately to a question
• Give the floor to an interrogator
• Raise a hand if you want to get the speaker’s attention

Live Meeting can also launch a text-chat window if you do not want to use your microphone to conduct a meeting.

Some features of the best webinar software:

• Allow up to 3,000 people to attend your webinar
• Allow access via any web browesr (Linux and Mac users can join in)
• Set entry questions for participants
• Engage your audience with polls and surveys
• Stream your webinar through the Cloud (thus reducing your bandwith need)
• Totally secure, encrypted connection
• Save a copy of the webinar on the data server

How webinars work (example showing Live Meeting):

What are my options?

There’s plenty of Webinar software out there, so what’s the best? We’ve been reviewing several bits of software and this short list weighs up the relative merits of each one.

Webex

Cisco’s webex has the biggest capacity of all, allowing up to 3,000 participants to join your online webinar. And if you’re looking to host such a large-scale webinar, then keeping tabs on who’s attending could be extremely worthwhile. Webex allows pre-registration (or open access, depending on your needs) and you can set up a meeting page for members of the public to use to log into your webinar.

Webex Overview

Webex Review

Microsoft Live Meeting

Reliable and secure, Live Meeting can handle webinars up to 1250 participants using the professional license. With lots of features and a very good ‘back end’ that allows you to set up polls and surveys, Live Meeting could be a good choice if you’re thinking of running webinars.

Microsoft Live Meeting Overview

Microsoft Live Meeting Review

Dim Dim Enterprise

The Enterprise edition of the popular free DimDim allows you to host meetings with up to 1,000 participants. Although the features are not quite as broad as either Cisco or Microsoft, the web-based interface of DimDim makes it a very attractive prospect. It’s also incredibly fast and user-friendly. We like DimDim – can you tell?

DimDim Overview

DimDim Review

Citrix Goto Webinar

The solution dedicated to Webinar is GoToMeeting’s sister product, GoToWebinar which also offers access up to 1,000 participants. The features include on-page registration and a fast client – a web-based version is also available. Record and replay webinars and allow access to those who couldn’t make it. Buying GoToWebinar will include a subscription to GoToMeeting which is designed for smaller collaborative projects.

GoToMeeting Overview

GoToMeeting Review