The Webinar Blog

WebEx Event Center Quirks

With all the news and analysis about acquisitions lately, it has been a while since I've written one of my pieces looking at specific product functionality. Since I pointed out a disappointment in Microsoft Live Meeting last time, it's only fair that I fire a shot at WebEx this time.

I have been working on developing a series of webinars for a client using WebEx Event Center. One of the nice features that WebEx built into the product is the ability to group a set of events under a "Program Name." You can invite people to look at all the events in a Program on a single page and register to attend one, some, or all of them with a single enrollment form. Very convenient.

WebEx supplies you with a hyperlink that goes directly to a given Program page so that you can publicize it with a link taking people straight to the items of interest. They don't have to ferret through other events and Programs you might have running at the same time. Again, nicely thought out.

Unfortunately, there is a strange implementation of the direct access Program page. You lose all the framing information that WebEx usually associates with an Event Center listings page. That means if you have customized your site to include your logo and branding, it's gone. If you had hyperlinks that would let visitors go to other sections of your website, they're gone. If visitors want to use the standard WebEx links to get online help, pre-load the software on their machine, or contact support... tough. Thosehave disappeared as well. Not very friendly to WebEx's enterprise customers or their audiences.

The second quirk is also associated with Event Center Programs. WebEx normally includes a nifty little feature to help you judge the effectiveness of different promotional channels in getting people to register for an event. You can include an arbitrary SourceID keyword at the end of a URL taking people to an event's enrollment page. The keyword is tracked along with their enrollment information. So while everybody comes to the same page to enroll, you can use a slightly different URL in your email invitations,banner ad click-throughs, search sponsorship ads, and so on. This immediately tells you which link is bringing you the most registrants. Very handy.

The problem comes when you want to promote a series of events under a Program. The link for the Program page doesn't track the SourceID keyword. So you have to make a choice... let people quickly and easily sign up for multiple events or track the effectiveness of your promotions by forcing your audience to follow a separate link for each event they wish to register for. I sure do wish WebEx would have realized that tracking a direct link entry into a Program page is just as important as tracking a single eventregistration link.

If any of my readers have a work-around for these features, I'd love to hear them!

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Technorati Tags: web conference, web conferencing, web event, web meeting, webcast, webcasting, WebEx, webinar

Vendor Thoughts On Cisco And Web Conferencing

When Cisco made its announcement about purchasing WebEx on March 15, competing web conferencing software vendor iLinc rushed out a press release the following day, talking about the news from their perspective. This got me wondering what other vendors might have to say about theshakeup in the market. I decided to contact several of them in different niches of the industry and see what they felt like sharing.

Of course I owe it to iLinc to start off the parade, since their statement was the impetus for the project. Mark Yeager is vice president of marketing at the company. Mark says that as a direct competitor to WebEx in the same market space, the announcement has been a short-term boost for iLinc. Some prospective customers who were making a vendor decision have elected not to get in the middle of an acquisition where they don't know howsupport and contracts will be handled by the new owners. He says iLinc can also push the idea of being solely focused on conferencing, while the service is not central to Cisco's business. He is also delighted with the valuation that Cisco came up with for WebEx, as it may make the investor community smile a little more brightly on other public web conferencing companies.

Mark also points out that the fear and uncertainty factor in the new ownership affects potential business partners looking to work with a web conferencing vendor. A company in a space such as CRM, social collaboration, or e-Learning that wants to add integration with a web conferencing vendor might prefer to do business with a smaller, more focused entity.

Mark finished with a compliment to the WebEx "sales and marketing machine." They have been remarkably important in promoting and evangelizing web conferencing as a mainstream business tool and Mark says he hopes that Cisco doesn't "crush" the new acquisition as they have occasionally done with past purchases.

Isaac Garcia came at the question from his perspective as CEO and founder of Central Desktop, a company that combines web conferencing with a larger suite of shared workspace collaboration services. He pointed at WebEx's web-based sales model for small and medium business (SMB) customers. It is largely a matter of making sure they are seen everywhere on the web and letting prospects come to them. Isaac saysthat Cisco doesn't have that kind of an approach and will have to learn from WebEx if they are to act on their statements about using WebEx as an entree into the SMB world. Isaac thinks it is more likely that WebEx will become more of an enterprise tool than the other way 'round. He says it is very difficult to move downmarket from a large, expensive, full-featured enterprise utility to something more palatable to an SMB world. You can't afford to remove features and functionality to justify a lower pricebecause your differentiation goes away.

Although Central Desktop offers its own version of a unified collaboration platform, Isaac doesn't feel that he is likely to get into competition with a Cisco/WebEx offering in that area. He says that the larger company has to justify and maintain a massive sales overhead with big ticket enterprise sales. Central Desktop as a smaller vendor can scale their operations to handle volumes of lower-priced sales to SMBs. As he put it: "They won't want to compete in the small market. It's too bloody down here! Largerenterprises with their large channels are not as precise and efficient as many of the smaller vendors are."

Brainshark offers yet another view of the deal, as they don't compete in the web conferencing arena at all. They offer an alternative to live webcasts with recorded events that integrate lead tracking services. Joe Gustafson, the CEO of Brainshark, was initially surprised at the thought that Cisco would be interested in an application software purchase that didn't directly link to their core hardware business.But he thinks that all the attention given to the use of web-delivered communications is good for the industry as a whole. He had been worried that publicity and attention had been languishing, especially with Microsoft all but ignoring web conferencing after buying Placeware and renaming it to Live Meeting. He is interested in seeing whether Cisco buries WebEx in their platform as an enabling technology supporting an overall infrastructure play or keeps working on diverse applications such as WebEx's Sales Center,Training Center, Event Center, and so on. He thinks that if Cisco leaves the WebEx business alone, it is likely to be more successful and help the industry hit the high growth projections put forth by several analysts. Joe was skeptical about Cisco's ability to move down into the SMB market as well. They have traditionally sold to enterprise IT departments who like to control everything centrally. SaaS is attractive to business units who don't want to worry about setup and maintenance. They just want touse a service and move on with their business.

I made overtures to two of WebEx's most well known direct competitors... Adobe (with its Acrobat Connect product) and Citrix (makers of GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar). Neither company wanted to be interviewed on the subject. Citrix did send along a prepared statement in an email message saying that Cisco'spurchase "underscores the huge market potential of real time collaboration technologies." Nothing too earth-shaking there.

And as always, everybody waits with bated breath to see when and whether the long-touted Unified Communications vision from Microsoft will come to fruition with web conferencing tied in to all its other functions.

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Technorati Tags: Brainshark, Central Desktop, Cisco, Citrix, iLinc, Unified Collaboration, Unified Communications, web collaboration, web conference, web conferencing, web event, web meeting, WebEx, webinar

Onstream Acquires Infinite

Onstream Media put out an announcement today that they are buying Infinite Conferencing. The CEO of Onstream, Randy Selman, graciously agreed totalk with me about the acquisition.

He said that Onstream Media has been looking to acquire an audio conferencing company for a number of years and had even made bids in the past that never came to fruition. Infinite Conferencing was a prime target at the current time, since they are already a reseller of Onstream's products and services and had characteristics that suited Onstream's requirements in terms of finances, staff, and operations.

I asked if Infinite's operations would be merged into the main Onstream business or if their conferencing services would continue as a separate unit. Randy told me that while they would continue to make use of the services in concert (audio conferencing and webcast production/streaming, for instance) there was no need to do a massive technical integration and Infinite would largely remain as a separate arm of the company providing the conferencing they do now.

Randy was most impressed by Infinite's online marketing channel and said that he wanted to make use of their expertise to broaden the use of it to include Onstream's complete line of digital media services.

I know Onstream mainly from its large-audience webcasting expertise, along with associated webinar services. But Randy explained that they are a complete service provider for almost anything having to do with digital communications delivered over the web. In addition to event services, they help companies with video encoding, metatagging, streaming, storage, and "monetizing" (for instance, adding advertisements before or after video content or integrating payment processing). I asked him if they have anythingto help companies with legal discovery requirements for broadcast content (a subject I wrote about last December). He said that they have turnkey services that can process an audio/video file with speech to text synthesis, index the content with keywords, and tie them back to time codes in the original archive. That should be of interest to any company making public statements throughwebcasts or webinars.

This acquisition obviously follows closely on the heels of Cisco's well publicized purchase of WebEx. I asked Randy for his thoughts on the WebEx story and how it affects Onstream Media. He pointed to Cisco's combined purchases of WebEx and social networking company Five Across as a sign that online communications of all sorts is in an immense growth phase. He thinks weare destined to see more consolidations in many different segments of the online communications/collaboration industry. And while he doesn't view the giant multi-product companies like Cisco and Microsoft as direct competitors, Randy sees a need for more digital media control and processing as a key to their continued success. "While we could lose an account to a pure-play conferencing vendor if a client wanted only one function, we are the only one-stop choice for all the technologies necessary to handle completedigital media services to produce, store, stream, and monetize the content."

Randy hinted that Onstream Media will likely continue a strategy combining organic growth with acquisitions when they see an opportunity to add new and innovative technologies dealing with digital media.

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Technorati Tags: audio conferencing, Infinite Conferencing, Onstream, Onstream Media, Randy Selman, web collaboration, web conferencing, web event, webcast, webcasting, webinar

Live Meeting Color - Followup

On March 12 I published an entry talking about problems with recordings in Microsoft Live Meeting. When you record a Live Meeting webinar, the recording collapses slide content into a 256-color palette, making many images come out inaccurately on the playback.

I submitted a bug report through the Microsoft Live Meeting online help system on March 6 and received a response the same day telling me that "We are diligently working to resolve your issue, but a determination has been made to escalate your issue to a higher level of support. We will be contacting you soon with a status update."

For completeness' sake, I will let you know that I received that additional contact today, March 26. Here is the full text of the response:

Greetings Ken,

This is Xxxx Xxxxxx with Live Meeting support. I wanted to follow up with you concerning the request to Increase the color depth in Live Meeting Recordings.

I want to thank you for taking the time to help us improve our product. Suggestions from our customers form an important part of our product improvement process, and we greatly appreciate your feedback.

This support ticket may close, however the feature request will remain open and active.

Please note that Live Meeting support cannot guarantee that any particular feature request will be added to a future release of the service. However, each comment we receive for a specific feature will increase its visibility, which improves the chances of it being implemented.

If you have any clients expressing a concern on this, feel free to have them notify support directly. We will be happy to add their information to the feature request.

Please let me know if I can answer any questions.

Best regards,

Xxxx Xxxxxxx

So it went from diligently working to resolve my issue to a form letter stating that my feature request had been added to a system and may or may not be implemented in some future release.

I have worked in software development as well as product management and product marketing. I'm well aware that sometimes things simply are the way they are in the current version of a product and there's no way to get around it. That seems to be the case with Live Meeting recordings. I have to say that I am disappointed in the promptness and tone of the communication however. Level and quality of support is increasingly important as a determinant in which vendor to choose for your web conferencing needs as consolidationsreduce the number of players and as feature sets become increasingly commoditized. This was not a shining example of how Microsoft differentiates themselves from the competition.

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Technorati Tags: Live Meeting, Microsoft, web conference, web conferencing, web event, web meeting, webinar

When You Have To Meet In Person

Here's an item just for Friday fun. I was browsing around Sue Pelletier's Face2Face meetings blog and came across her mention of the ConferenceBike. Imagine scheduling your next 7-person conference not in the third-floor meeting room, but on a bicycle. Yes, you read that right. One person steers and up to six others can face the center and pedal, discussing which web conferencing solution is right for the company's needs. Let's see a telepresence solution mimic this meeting experience!

The bike is made in Germany and can be delivered internationally. For my New York readers (and cynics who don't believe anything unusual or humorous can ever be real), you can try out the bike yourself with a fee-based ride through Central Park or Times Square, courtesy of PartyBike.com. It's $150/hour of use (per bike, not per person) and they have lots of pictures on their site showing it in action around the Big Apple.

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Kolabora Kovers Ko-Browsing

Robin Good has posted a dynamite explanation and review of co-browsing collaboration software on his Kolabora blog. Co-browsing is a limited form of synchronization between computers that simply gets both users to the same web page at the same time. Depending on the sophistication of the software, it may enable additional actions or forced synchronization once theweb page has been displayed.

This functionality is not often exploited in webinars or formal one-to-many broadcast events, but I like to use it for one particular purpose whenever the feature is offered by a vendor. At the end of my presentation I'll bring my audience to a web page with an interactive feedback form that also contains direct hyperlinks to sites I'd like them to visit. This has advantages over a typical polling question embedded in a web conferencing presentation. People can be more loquacious in their responses, youcan design any kind of interaction and graphics that you want on the page, and you get to continue your marketing and guidance of the audience to additional resources.

Robin does a great roundup of software packages that concentrate purely on the co-browsing technology. Definitely recommended reading.

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Technorati Tags: collaboration, Kolabora, Robin Good, screen sharing, co-browsing, web collaboration, web meeting

Presentation Speaking Tips Webinar - Sign Up Now!

Just a quick reminder that I am giving one of my most popular webinars on Friday and you still have time to sign up. Improving Your Online Presentation Skills covers everything from proper preparation as a web seminar speaker to specific vocal techniques and habits that you can work on. I give you my word that this is not a thinly disguised marketing pitch for Webinar Successor for ReadyTalk, who is sponsoring this event. I'll be providing a true educational session that can help you improve your presentation effectiveness.

The event will last for one hour, including time for questions and answers. The Q&A session on these events has been a lot of fun, with many insightful questions that help dig in to topics of interest for the audience.

The webinar starts at 11am US Pacific Daylight Time or 2pm Eastern time. If you would like a quick and easy way to check the equivalent time in your city, click this link to TimeAndDate.com. As always, you should plan to connect about 5 minutes early to be on the safe side.

I hope to see you there. If your news reader didn't preserve the link for registration, you can type www.EffectiveWebinars.com into your browser to click through to the ReadyTalk reg page.

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Live Meeting Add-In Available

Microsoft has (very quietly) put an Add-in Pack on its website for Live Meeting 2005. The free download gives users of Microsoft's web conferencing software some new functionality in three main areas.

It lets users schedule Live Meeting sessions from Outlook, selecting participants from the address book and identifying them as attendees or presenters, with appropriate email invitations going to each (something you could do before only from the administrator's console when setting up an event).

It lets users start an immediate "Meet Now" session from a Microsoft Office application such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, or Project. The document being worked on shows up automatically in an application sharing window.

It lets users start a one-to-one Live Meeting session from an instant messenger session in Windows Messenger or MSN Messenger (both parties must have the software installed).

I'll never understand Microsoft's marketing machine. Here is the kind of news that got Adobe huge coverage when they effectively did the same thing with access to Connect from within Acrobat. Yet Microsoft's addition gets no press release, no banner on the product web page, and no media coverage. Perhaps they are worried about being seen as coming up with a "me-too" feature. Perhaps they don't want to make any announcements about Live Meeting 2005 because they are preparing a huge push for the new 2007 versiondue out some time this year (maybe). Perhaps it's just that Live Meeting has been buried in the corporate product stack and has no press or marketing budget or priority.

Whatever the case, there are still a lot of users of Microsoft Live Meeting as well as resellers of the software. Somebody should let these people know that the product is not completely stagnant!

UPDATE: 3/22/07 -- David points out correctly that this add-in has been available for a while. I got fooled because the Microsoft information page for the add-in lists the publication date as 3/20/2007. This date must refer to a new bug fix release of the add-in pack. Details on the updates are available at this link. I apologize to Microsoft and to my readers for the misleading post. I'd write more, but I'm having trouble pulling my foot out of my mouth. Thanks, David.

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Cisco / WebEx Analysis Roundup

By now, any interested reader should have been able to get their fill of of news stories about the Cisco acquisition of WebEx. Overly cautious types will point out that this is not a done deal, merely a tendered offer accepted by WebEx management. WebEx shareholders could vote it down or another company could come in with a higher competitive buyout offer. The odds are tremendously low for either of those scenarios to occur.

Cowen and Company's Peter Goldmacher says that a big "data oriented vendor" such as IBM, Oracle, or SAP could decide to go after WebEx as a data platform instead of a communications platform. Others have bandied about the possibility of Google or Yahoo bidding for WebEx to offer unified desktop applications and communications as part of an expanded hosted services platform. Nobody really expects any of these companies to get into a bidding war with Cisco though. The industry consensus is that the deal is a feteaccompli.

Analyst and blogger reactions have been mostly positive about the acquisition for both companies. It is seen as giving Cisco an entree into the small and medium business (SMB) market to broaden their reach from hardware designed for use in large enterprise data centers. It also gives them a way to expand the use of internet-routed data and thus, the use of more of their routers. Surprisingly, I haven't seen many articles talking about Cisco's past tentative steps towards offering combined collaboration services.They gave a shot at introducing a package with integrated telephony and web conferencing called Cisco Unified MeetingPlace, which I briefly surveyed at the Collaborative Technologies Conference last June. That was based on an OEM arrangement with Macromedia Breeze and doesn't seem to have had much traction. I think we can guess where that partnershipis about to go!

The best early coverage came from Network World and LinuxWorld, who got interviews with executives at Cisco and WebEx to get their initial statements about the synergies in the acquisition. LinuxWorld interviewed Gary Griffiths, president of WebEx products and operations. NetworkWorld interviewed Ned Hooper, president of corporate business development at Cisco.

Ephraim Schwartz also wrote a very good opinion piece in InfoWorld, detailing how the acquisition signals Cisco's move into Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) as a core part of their future success. It's worth reading. The other article I recommend on this subject is from Tim O'Reilly at the O'Reilly Radar blog. He calls the acquisition aWeb 2.0 platform play.

I have seen a few dissenting voices in the wilderness. David Utter wrote a piece titled "Cisco WebEx Buy Could Quickly Crater." He is skeptical about the worth of the technology because of potential new advances in video multicasting, but I think his underlying proposition is incorrect. WebEx's strength and value is not to enable videoconferencing.It enables web-based collaboration from small interactive group meetings to large, formal webinars. They also have a growing application business in their WebOffice shared workspace offering and a platform mashup play with WebEx Connect. None of those are vulnerable to the videoconferencing competition that Utter writes about.

Tom Keating says in his TMC VoIP & Gadgets blog that Cisco overpaid because the hosted collaboration space is very crowded and because the deal puts them into competition with Microsoft. I'm not qualified to comment on the pricing of the deal, but I would say that WebEx is valuable because of these points!

And for the most blunt minority view on the subject, take a gander at Rafe Needleman's Webware Rant. He says that WebEx's main product is "creaky, cumbersome, and overpriced." He also says that it is in danger of being technically eclipsed by products from Web 2.0 start-ups such as Vyew, Yugma, and SlideShare. This viewpoint again shows a personal bias towards simple slide share or application sharemeetings in a person-to-person or small group context. That's only one piece of the WebEx product stack (and is unlikely to be financially important for them going forward). But Needleman is a fun read.

That should give you some material to chew through that is more than a standard restatement of the acquisition press release. I'll check in again soon with the view from the vendor community.

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Technorati Tags: Cisco, collaboration, Ephraim Schwartz, SaaS, Unified Collaboration, Unified Communications, Unified Communications Group, web collaboration, web conferencing, web meeting, webcasting, WebEx, webinar, WebOffice

Cisco Buys WebEx

...And this is why everyone should meet virtually instead of physically traveling. I got up early this morning, did a quick news check to see if there were any overnight or early morning announcements I needed to react to, and got in the car for an 8-hour drive to attend a friend's retirement party. Upon reaching my hotel and plugging in to the Internet, there's the story waiting for me... Already old news by virtual communication standards and well covered by everyone in the business community.

If you haven't seen the official press release from Cisco, you can read it here. They have agreed to acquire WebEx for the equivalent of $3.2 billion US. The deal works out at $57/share for common stock holders of WebEx. For those of you who like to kick yourself in hindsight, you could have purchased WebEx at $34/share on January 22.

There's no way I can do the coverage justice in the short time I have available in my hotel room right now, so I'm going to direct interested readers to www.ConferencingNews.com to go through their portal of coverage links on the story.

In short, this instantly makes Cisco the industry leader (by market share) in the web conferencing industry, catapulting them past Microsoft and giving them a great technology base from which to attack the holy grail of a unified communications platform for enterprise use.

Let's see... Microsoft acquired Placeware, Adobe acquired Macromedia Breeze, West Communications (InterCall) acquired Raindance, and Cisco acquired WebEx. The list of acquisition candidates for large scale enterprise conferencing packages is awfully sparse now. The only ones left with some significant market share and recognition value are iLinc, ON24, and Citrix (if someone wanted to acquire the Citrix Online division). Although there are plenty of other technologies, they aren't on the same plain.

It's ironic that my mention of WebEx today would otherwise have been a reference to blog coverage and discussion surrounding a session at the Community 2.0 conference this week. Diane Davidson (director of customer marketing for WebEx) gave a presentation that struck some in the audience as too much sales pitch, not enough subject content. Then there was a tough Q&A session in the room. You can read comments from attendees and Diane in some back and forth in the following blog entries:

• Conflict in Community 2.0
• Challenging WebEx
• The Zen of Selling Without Pitching

There is fascinating content in all these articles and I don't have the time to do them justice. Recommended reading for those who like to track such things. Is the discussion moot now with the new corporate ownership? Unlikely. The WebEx division should still be wanting to foster community and the Cisco owners should want as much customer satisfaction and product/service quality as possible associated with their name.

More when I have the time to dig in. Why don't companies schedule these things in accordance with my schedule?!

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