[NA] Web conferencing - GoToMeeting, WebEx, or Skype?

Van Johnston

Van Johnston

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Van Johnston
Our little tech firm needs to mature past the "send everyone the slides and 800 number to call in to" stage of collaboration, so we are looking for web conferencing solutions.

The real catalyst is the need to do a design review with an Asian customer in an infrastructure-challenged location. In addition to showing slides, we also need to be able to review schematics and mechanical drawings, so sharing a computer screen is essential. Also need quality audio, and video of the people on each end (not necessarily simultaneously with showing your screen).

For this particular meeting, just two nodes. If we decide to keep it for our internal use, 3-4 nodes. Based on this comparison, I'm leaning toward GoToMeeting, but would like to hear others' experience and recommendations.

Thanks
 
Look at Zoom. When I used them both, I found it to be just as good and a better price-point.
 
We've got WebEx and Skype for Business at my shop and I'm not impressed with either. It could be our configuration, but we have more than our fare share of issues with audio connections on both platforms.
 
Oh, and on a PC, GoToMeeting will want to "phone home" to "check communications" EVERY time you boot up, and then make random connections with their server at other times. I finally put in a firewall block that I took off when I needed to use the service.
 
I don't think Skype has the capability to share screens, as far as I know. We use GoToMeeting for interoffice teleconferencing. It seems to work fine.
 
Sac Arrow said:
I don't think Skype has the capability to share screens, as far as I know. We use GoToMeeting for interoffice teleconferencing. It seems to work fine.
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Our version of Skype for Business supports screen sharing.
 
We supposedly switched from WebEx to LoopUp. I say "supposedly" because there's still a lot of folks that continue to use WebEx, as LoopUp just doesn't cut it for all the screen sharing, control switching, "step away from the keyboard and let ME drive!" stuff that happens here.

LoopUp does ok for a conference call and limited presentation stuff tho.
 
Google Hangouts.

Permits screen sharing and VOIP conferencing.
 
Skype for Business is mostly what I support (IT consulting). Are you on Office 365 now? Most of the plans include Web Conferencing and you can add dial in conferencing for $4/month per user (only the people who schedule the meetings would need that).
 
Van Johnston said:
For this particular meeting, just two nodes. If we decide to keep it for our internal use, 3-4 nodes. Based on this comparison, I'm leaning toward GoToMeeting, but would like to hear others' experience and recommendations.
Click to expand...

That comparison link does not appear to accurately reflect the WebEx capabilities. I wouldn't necessarily use WebEx for video conferencing (though it can do it), but for presentations and screen sharing, it's the best I've found.


JKG
 
TCABM said:
Our version of Skype for Business supports screen sharing.
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Even free Skype supports screen sharing.

I use both Zoom and Skype 5 to 10 times a week to various places. I find the audio quality of Skype on average MUCH better than Zoom. No contest. I often have minutes on Zoom at a time where it just goes off into bizarro robot land.

For just screen sharing, cant beat TeamViewer. I dont really use theit other colab features so cant comment on it, but they have it.

Then there is Microsoft Teams... Microsoft aparently forgot how to write win32 software. So they have a native client on OSX and an HTTP5 client on Windows. They cant even get PgUp/PgDn to work. Pass.
 
Have used everything mentioned above, honestly. Used to be in that biz too.

They all generally work. I'd go WebEx or Hangouts for presentations, TeamViewer for remote control, and probably Skype for a few folks collaborating. Hangouts isn't awful for that either.

All can have some annoying bugs that'll crap out when it's the most inconvenient. Probably WebEx had the least of these overall.

One place you have to watch carefully is if you need the thing recorded for later playback. Only a few of them do that well.

And for the ultimate in compatibility between companies and platforms and integration with damned near anything, BlueJeans Network.

That's the one to use if both ends have systems their corporate entities say can't be changed but they need to communicate with each other.

Can't speak to pricing. At the job where this is all we did, we had corp accounts for all of them for interop testing. At the current place, folks generally use whatever they want and we pretty much ignore it. They usually choose whether they can get free. And since we're a GSuite shop now, most often for collaboration it's Hangouts, and for presentations the sales folk like WebEx. The tech teams usually use TeamViewer for any weird "across the firewall" remote control support needs that are cross-platform in any way, and boring old RDP for maintaining Winderz boxes.
 
P.S. Hangouts still generally sucks at doing anything full screen or mixed screen resolution. I just remembered that annoyance.
 
Thanks for all the feedback. A colleague in FL and I did a test run with Zoom this afternoon, and it looks like it does everything we need it to do without having to register or pay anything. We tried Google Hangouts too, but he said it did not support screen sharing. I'll ask him to take a second look.

I looked at the TeamViewer website and looks like way overkill for what we need right now.

I tried to find a website for Lookup but all the Google hits either refered to the Excel function or reverse phone number lookup.

No, we are not on Office 365. I have been invited to Skype for Business conferences but there is something about our configuration that prevents outgoing audio.

The international aspect of this is a big driver. We need something our 2nd world customer can use simply and reliably. The integrated VOIP is a must; dial in is not reliable on their end and there is already enough language barrier with their accents that the delays in the teleconference system we use would make it unbearable for both sides.

Thanks again.
 
Blue Jeans is amazing. We used it at my last job - connected multiple sites together with out existing polycom systems and also had random dial ins and webcam participants.

Worked like everyone had a high dollar VTC going
 
Van Johnston said:
The international aspect of this is a big driver. We need something our 2nd world customer can use simply and reliably. The integrated VOIP is a must; dial in is not reliable on their end and there is already enough language barrier with their accents that the delays in the teleconference system we use would make it unbearable for both sides.
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I think if they're horribly bandwidth limited the real problem will be the video. Most of these will gracefully degrade video to keep audio as packet loss climbs, but a few merge the two into a single stream and that gets really annoying fast if working with a bandwidth constrained site.

Some do some pre-buffering if you're using a slide deck before the next slide is needed -- the presentation based ones for huge conferences (WebEx) do this instead of relying on the screen share catching up.

In general it's best to test with the site known to be difficult before relying on any of them for a really important meeting. Just have the folks at the far end assign someone to do an hour of tests and try a few products during that timeframe. Then do exactly the sort of usage that will happen during the real deal.

When I supported video conferencing stuff, we always had at least one customer call a quarter or so who'd say "it works fine when we test but falls apart when 30 people are on"... well yeah, of course... how big is your internet connection? Perhaps you need an MCU on-site to gather all the locals and then link that MCU to the conference MCU? ;-)

Audio only was always the "lingua franca" of conferencing. It always worked. Slides, video and remote control, were the next levels up from that, and the products would usually fail in that order in reverse when bandwidth or packet loss rates sucked. :)

My favorite was the people who called who were doing HD quality video between multiple vendors so it had to use high bandwidth and not very compressed. They said their conferences in the morning sucked. And only sometimes.

We looked and saw their bandwidth was really high for a typical HD call on the main conference room endpoint. So we set up a test call to us at the usual time of day of the call, etc. They called right before the morning meeting.

"Hey that looks pretty good, but yeah... I see it freezing. Can you close the blinds behind you?"

"Sure. Why?"

"The wind is blowing. Every leaf on that tree and all the branches are moving. That's driving the need to update more blocks of the screen sky high. Yep. There you go. Half the bandwidth and boy that looks better!"

LOL. Tech. Always entertaining.

That one had gotten so political the bosses wanted an update. I walked into my boss' office who had a sense of humor...

"Company X's problem with the conference room is fixed. I told them to cut down the tree outside. Or close the blinds."

He knew exactly what had happened and started laughing.
 
Van Johnston said:
Thanks for all the feedback.

snip
I tried to find a website for Lookup but all the Google hits either refered to the Excel function or reverse phone number lookup.
snip

Thanks again.
Click to expand...

That's because it's LoopUp ... loopup.com ... but then when I just typed it, @#$&($ autocorrect changed it to lookup again so maybe that also happened above?
 
gkainz said:
That's because it's LoopUp ... loopup.com ... but then when I just typed it, @#$&($ autocorrect changed it to lookup again so maybe that also happened above?
Click to expand...

Ah. Nope, not autocorrect, I just read too fast. OK, I will research LoopUp. Thanks.
 
We've tried all of the above, as well as Mikogo, RingCentral, and several others.

Based on that, well... They all suck, but GoToMeeting seems to suck less than the others. So that'd be my recommendation.
 
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