Shawn Shadfar at omNovia did an excellent job describing the Top 10 Features You Need in a Web Conferencing System. In his post, he outlined the following considerations:
While each is worthwhile for different purposes, he did a great job summarizing why reliability is probably the most important concern of all:
- Reliability
- No Software Installs
- Versatile Desktop Sharing
- Integrated Voice
- Ease of Customization
- Full Recording
- Flexible Recording
- Powerful Slide Show
- Configurable Chat
- Controllable Document Sharing
While each is worthwhile for different purposes, he did a great job summarizing why reliability is probably the most important concern of all:
If the key word in real-estate is Location, Reliability applies to web conferencing. No matter how good the features, the up-time of the system and its ability to automatically correct problems will determine your success during your webinars. The majority of web conferencing platforms (especially some of the recently developed low-cost systems) provide a “good-enough” platform that works 97% of the time. But web conferencing when used for business critical applications is similar to electricity. It is “not good enough” to have 3% of the time technical problems. It has to work all the time. Many systems allocate 1 server to 10,000+ users to reduce their costs. Reliable systems cost a little more but provide servers with less users, high availability and more importantly the ability to instantly and seamlessly switch to another server or servers in case of technical trouble.Especially if you're in sales, that 3% can be extremely costly. Make sure that you consider the most important characteristics when you're making your web conferencing software selection.
