The Webinar Blog

A Long Overdue Look At Elluminate

Elluminate has been around for some time, concentrating on web collaboration primarily for education and training (although they have spill-over into standard enterprise business communications uses). For some reason, I have never been engaged on a client webinar using Elluminate web conferencing software, so I called them up and asked for a demo.

Elluminate markets its full-functionality web conferencing software under the name Elluminate Live! (the exclamation point and italics are their branding, not my emphasis). The software is available in an Academic Edition, Enterprise Edition, and Lite Edition. They also allow you to test basic functionality with a free collaborative version for three-way conferencing under the vRoom name.

I didn't have a chance to use the software as an administrator, so I won't comment on the ease or idiosyncrasies of scheduling events, managing users, or reporting. Instead I'll give my quick impressions of the conferencing functionality. As with every web conferencing technology, there are strengths and weaknesses and you need to match them to your priorities.

The focus on education and training means that Elluminate Live! has specialized features such as breakout rooms (move a large set of meeting participants into smaller sub-meetings where they can collaborate and use the conferencing features to work apart from the other breakout groups). Elluminate has also gone to some lengths to ensure integration with popular Learning Management Systems such as Blackboard and WebCT.

Initial automatic installation of the software on my computer when joining my first meeting took around 25-30 seconds to load a large number of Java JAR files. My antivirus security software was triggered numerous times to confirm installations and connections to the Internet. After the software has been accessed from your machine, subsequent startups are much faster. Users must have Sun Java on their computers... the old Microsoft Java is not supported. The software runs on any platform with a Java implementation, so it doesn't matter if your presenters and audience are on Windows, Macintosh, Linux, or Unix machines.

As a new meeting participant, I was greeted with a popup window filled with a very long, densely written End User License agreement. Every participant attempting to join your conference is forced to click agreement with the verbiage before they can connect. This feature alone gives the software a black eye for use in outbound public lead generation or marketing uses. You'll lose potential audience members who refuse to sign away legal rights just to hear your pitch. I'm sure this is not as much a problem for educational venues where your students already know and trust you. Still, it seems like a strange way to treat audience members and this is the only web conferencing software I have seen with such an implementation.

Elluminate Live! is designed for use with computer headsets or speakers. Audio is delivered via VoIP and uses an automatic voice activation feature that silences a user's microphone when s/he is not speaking. Unfortunately the silence is so complete that every time my presenter paused to take a breath, I thought I had lost the connection. There is no sense of background ambient noise maintained to let the audience know the speaker is still on the line. Add to this the fact that the live audio was rather "buzzy" over my headphones, and the discontinuity was disconcerting.

When we were talking back and forth interactively, there was a short but noticeable lag between each person's content. The symptoms were akin to satellite delays in long distance communications, where one person finishes speaking and there is a brief pause before the other person reacts and responds. In a highly interactive conversation, this would get a bit tiresome. The software supports up to four simultaneous interactive microphones.

Internet-delivered audio is prone to all kinds of degradation outside the control of a web conferencing provider: users have slow connections, data packets get lost or re-routed and have to be reassembled at the far end, trunks get temporary congestion, and so on. Elluminate has attempted to compensate for these problems in a variety of ways. There is both manual and automatic bandwidth compensation within a meeting. If a listener hits an Internet lag that causes temporary silence, their audio stream automatically accelerates to a higher pitch faster playback until they catch up with the live stream again. Longer delays cause the system to prompt the user on whether they would prefer to listen to the buffered section or just discard it and jump straight back to the live stream. 

In the current version, you can use a hardware phone bridge device to bring telephone audio into your computer as a source for the delivered stream. This would let you run a simultaneous phone and VoIP audio session. The next version of the product should include fully integrate phone and VoIP audio in software.

Session management is very detailed and configurable. There are levels of authority and an administrator can control all sorts of permissions for groups or individuals about what they can see and use in the system (ability to annotate, speak, text chat, etc). Elluminate has one of the most detailed user management setups I have seen in a web conferencing product.

Whiteboard tools have the usual controls for drawing and adding text, with a very nice implementation of drag and drop. Users can move things around the screen and rearrange text lists. This is great for group brainstorming sessions.

Application sharing allows all three possible options for what to show your audience. You can share your entire desktop, a named application, or a defined rectangular region of your screen. The presenter has the option to configure the sharing environment for higher quality or faster transmission. Unfortunately on my PowerPoint torture test, I found that the highest quality setting wasn't sufficient to show smooth true-color gradients (the colors were displayed in bands), while the fastest transmission setting wasn't sufficient to keep up with slide-to-slide transition effects or smooth animations on a slide.

Basic audience polling inside a presentation is rather spartan. You can only ask single-selection multiple choice questions... no "select all that apply". And when you display the results to the audience, they always see absolute number of responses. I prefer an option to show only percentages in case you don't want to advertise that you have a small turnout. This is another case where marketing and educational uses have different needs and priorities.

There is a separate facility for creating much more complex and powerful quizzes that allow text answers, radio buttons, drop-downs, and so on. Unfortunately you can only see these results in post-event reports, so they aren't a direct substitute for the interactive polling feature.

Recording a session stores it on Elluminate's servers in a proprietary (VCR) format. This results in very small file sizes (an hour presentation might be only 10MB). You can download a VCR recording file and place it on a CD along with Elluminate's viewing software so recipients can play it back immediately (it doesn't require a local install of the viewer software). You can also convert your recording to a more standard Flash or MOV format (which will be much larger).

One intriguing feature I didn't have a chance to test was absolutely unique to Elluminate Live!. Users can take notes on their system during a presentation. When they play back the recording of the event, their notes display in synch with the content. That's pretty snazzy! Recordings also preserve interactive portions of the live event, so if the presenter sent out a file share to the audience, recording viewers can get the file as well. If there was an interactive Web tour during the live event, the recording will lead viewers through the same Web pages.

I asked about registration management and was told that you can create registration pages with or without passwords for events. You can also send out an individual secure link that is different for each attendee. If an attendee forwards it to someone else (for instance, to avoid paying two registration fees) the system blocks the second attempt to log in. This is great for fee-based events. Of course you get all the usual reports on attendance, registration, chat logs, and so on.

My take on Elluminate from this quick overview is that it serves its primary purpose well. Trainers and educators should be able to easily carry out their online sessions using the software. Features such as group interactive whiteboards and breakout rooms are very useful for these applications. The cross-platform aspects are welcome for serving a diverse audience. The use of VoIP for audio eliminates having to set up and pay for an audio conference line and can be effective for international meetings where phone access can get expensive.

I am not quite as keen on Elluminate Live! for marketing and lead generation events. Your audience can see other members of the audience in the participant list, which may raise privacy concerns and may be embarrassing if you have poor turnout. The license agreement for one-time participants is overbearing. And polling is not implemented for maximum marketing effectiveness.

Elluminate itself seems to be a strong company with a mature product, good customer base, and proper support facilities. It is worth a look if your priorities fit the product's strengths.

Technorati Tags: Elluminate , vRoom , web conferencing , web conference , web meeting , eTraining , online training , web collaboration , webinar

EventSpan Goes A-Crawling

I see on the EventSpan blog that they are ramping up a facility to automatically "crawl" the web looking for webinars and webcasts. These will be returned in search results along with the more detailed listings they get from people who add explicit event postings. That puts them into direct functionality competition with Finervista. It also should make them even more attractive as an acquisition target for a big search company. Being able to properly find and link to events that aren't obsolete is spectacularly useful as an automated task and helps to quickly build search content. This is tremendously important, as visitors quickly make up their minds about whether it is worth doing a search on a site based on the results they get on a test or two.

By the way, their blog article stated that "EventSpan stands on three legs: Search. Syndication. Social Networking." And the first thing that went through my mind was a fervent hope that they aren't programming in LISP!

I shouldn't make fun of them. EventSpan is nice enough to have my webinar in rotation as a featured event on their home page. As you can see from the widget below, it's counting down to showtime on Friday. There's still time for you to sign up... just click on the link.

I love this syndication link feature. It makes it SO easy to advertise my event!

Technorati Tags: EventSpan , Finervista , search engine , webinar , webcast

Insight24 Gets a Facelift

ON24 issued a press release today announcing that their Insight24 "business to business rich media network" now contains over 5000 recordings from over 160 companies. They also introduced a new look and feel to the site.

I spoke with Tom Masotto, ON24's vice president of business development, about the new features and growth of the site. He said the company wanted the service to be less like a traditional column listing of search results and more "Web 2.0". They have gone to a pictorial layout, with large thumbnail images giving a graphic representation of each available recording. Hover your mouse over a thumbnail and you get a popup detail box about the recording.

Categorization is important to Insight24, and the site features several ways to group and browse recordings. You can look at a global collection of all listings or focus on a business category or a providing company. Within any of those views, you can click on tabs to see the most recent, most popular, or featured events. I asked about the "featured" category and Tom confirmed that this is a sponsored listing area that acts as a revenue generator for ON24. Companies typically have events featured as part of a larger collection of services associated with lead generation and promotion.

The website also displays "tag clouds" on the home page, letting users get a quick visual representation of the content within the system. Unlike most tag clouds I have seen, the sizes of the terms do not correspond to popularity and click counts, but instead show the relative number of entries associated with that term. That is not explained anywhere on the site that I could find.

Tom also told me there were some internal changes that are not visible, but have an important benefit. ON24 changed the URL structure of the listings on the site, making them more exposed and palatable to organic search engines such as Google. So there is a higher probability that a listed event will get picked up and displayed on a generic web search.

Insight24 is tightly linked with the concept of lead generation, and that is what ON24 uses as a competitive differentiation point. Instead of sending visitors to each event's custom-designed registration page, Insight24 has visitors register and log in once. They can then watch any number of events, with their registration information automatically passed through to the providing company. Tom mentioned that ON24 hosted over 12,000 webcasts last year and about half of them were for lead generation purposes. Since recorded ON24 content is easily pulled into the Inisght24 listing structure, they have a large base of lead generation recordings to start with.

Insight24 is also working on expanding its reach through syndicating the content. ON24 has announced partnerships with IT.com and ITToolbox.com, which give visitors search access to the Insight24 content. The press release says their syndication network reaches over eight million B2B and IT monthly users.

The recent growth in websites focused on webcast search, syndication, and organization is an indication that companies are finally becoming more aware that webinars are valuable business assets that need to be properly marshaled and exploited. I'm very encouraged by the activity and attention that sites like Insight24 are getting.

Technorati Tags: ON24 , Insight24 , Tom Masotto , lead generation , webcast , webinar , web conferencing , recorded event

Acrobat Connect: Better... Stronger... Faster.

Adobe released a Service Pack last week that enhances its Acrobat Connect and Acrobat Connect Professional web conferencing software. Service packs are often reserved for applying critical bug fixes between formal product releases, and while Service Pack 3 includes some bug fixes, Adobe is touting the upgrade as a major functional improvement to Connect.

I got a demo and briefing from Peter Ryce, a "Connectionist" (aka Technical Evangelist) at Adobe. You can hear Peter give you a short recorded overview of the upgrade at this link. He explained that the upgrade affects several areas of operation in the Connect products.

The most important upgrade is the use of a new codec in the video handling portions of Connect. A codec is the software algorithm that compresses and reconstitutes the bit stream making up the video signal. Connect previously used the codec that came standard in Flash version 6 (Connect is completely Flash-based and uses the power of that software to drive both the presenter and audience side of the application). Adobe did some market penetration studies and concluded that Flash 8 or 9 is now installed on most computer systems (Peter mentioned a 95-96 adoption rate), so they felt comfortable in upgrading Connect to use the improved codec included in those versions of the software.

The new codec significantly reduces the amount of information flowing over the Internet when a presenter shows a video, HTML animation, or screen share from his or her desktop. The smaller bandwidth usage makes for a faster and smoother playback on the audience's computers. Peter says that in their testing they saw anywhere from three to six times improvements in transmission quality over the old release.

I asked about improvements to audio playback and Peter said that audio improvements would purely be a side effect of the smaller video bandwidth. They didn't change the audio streaming algorithms, but there is now more "room" for the audio data to move through the Web to participants' computers since the video takes up less "space." (I'm simplifying because this isn't a technical forum. Datacomm professionals are advised to take a stress pill.)

Adobe hired handl Consulting to run performance tests on the new Connect screen sharing versus WebEx, Live Meeting, GoToMeeting, and Yugma. You can view the report here. The summary conclusion was that Connect beat the combined average performance of those four in categories of Latency, Smoothness, Fidelity, Total Bandwidth Consumption, and Average Bandwidth Consumption. The report does not deliver head-to-head comparisons against any one of the competitors taken alone.

I had Peter show me a number of screen sharing scenarios. My personal take is that it is indeed an improvement and good enough for most common conferencing applications. But when I asked Peter to run my PowerPoint torture test in full screen slide show mode, I was able to spot obvious areas where the polling and transmission of large amounts of data couldn't keep up with the full slide redraws necessary to do smooth slide transitions.

The screen sharing feature that I found most disconcerting was the way Adobe chose to implement cursor display from the presenter's desktop. Instead of transmitting the image of the cursor (which requires constantly erasing and redrawing not only the cursor, but the information under it), Connect transmits only the location coordinates of the cursor. It is physically drawn on each audience member's screen as a local image. This is very efficient, but has inevitable drawbacks. If you change your desktop cursor (for instance, using an extra large cursor for better visibility) the audience doesn't see it that way. If you are demonstrating a software application that changes the cursor as a visual indicator, your audience won't see it. And if you show a web page, your audience won't see cursor changes such as an hourglass or hand symbol, which are important indicators in browser operations.

The locally drawn cursor also annoyed me, as it has a "cute" little icon attached to it that indicates you are viewing the presenter's cursor rather than your own. The icon is distracting and covers up more space than it needs to. I suggested that Adobe offer an option to see a "normal" cursor in this mode. Heck, it's just a locally loaded symbol... they could make an entire gallery of cursors available at the viewer's preference!

The remaining improvements included in the Service Pack are:

• Support for additional languages. Users can see all onscreen menus, commands, messages, help, and documentation in languages such as Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, Italian, Simplified Chinese, and Spanish.
  
• Support for native Intel chipsets on Macintosh computers. Mac users no longer have to configure their settings to use the Rosetta emulation mode. A single universal code base runs Connect on both PowerPC and Intel machines.
  
• Support for integrated telephone user management from the web console for enterprises using Avaya or Cisco MeetingPlace switches. This complements the existing phone management through Premiere Global audio conferencing.
  
• Creation of a new Connect user group forum for sharing information in an online community format.

That's a nice collection of improvements for an interim Service Pack. My respect for the Connect platform continues to grow. If this is what they do between release numbers, I can't wait for the next formal release!

By the way, you can see the Acrobat Connect platform in action this Thursday, September 20, when I use it to deliver a free webinar on how to make your webinars more effective.

 

 

Technorati Tags: Adobe , Acrobat , Adobe Connect , Acrobat Connect , Connect Professional , web conferencing , Peter Ryce , screen sharing , application sharing , webinar , web meeting , web event

EventSpan Shares Its Content

EventSpan just published an API for developers who want to grab content listings from the site. That may sound dry and uninteresting, but it's actually a fascinating wrinkle on the straightforward event search functionality most others in this space have concentrated on providing.

Instead of requiring visitors to come to the website and manually enter a search term to find events of interest (which is still possible), other web programmers and application developers can programmatically make calls to the database of listings and work with the results to display them in other places. This is part of the syndication model that EventSpan mentions in its self-description.

By making it possible to spread event listings out to multiple access channels, EventSpan can potentially be more attractive as a repository site for people choosing where to list their events. On a classic event search site, the only people who will ever see your event listing are those who go to the search site. But EventSpan has now opened the door to having your event show up on other engines. I don't know why the major search engine vendors wouldn't jump on this opportunity and pull the listings for display on their sites.

Consider Google. There are now special Google search specialties for blogs, books, groups, patents, photos, and shopping sites. If they can grab a source for events, why not add that to their list of offerings? It's an interesting thought and one might wonder whether EventSpan is killing itself by empowering competitors. But then all one has to do is think back to the early days of personal computing. The PC opened its architecture and allowed others to work with their specs. The Apple didn't. Market share over the years reflected which of those was the more successful strategy from a revenues perspective (I'll leave debates about quality preferences out of this!).

I notice that EventSpan has not published a similar automated standard for uploading events onto the site. You have to contact them if you are a bulk listings provider. Probably a good idea there... All kinds of garbage could come flooding in otherwise.

This is worth keeping an eye on.

Technorati Tags: EventSpan , webinar , web conferencing , search engine , event listing

The Problem With Streaming Webinar Audio

Here's where I make a number of vendors angry.

I am seeing a growing trend in the exclusive use of computer-based audio for webinars. I'm not a fan. Let me be perfectly clear what I'm opposed to, however... I have nothing against offering streamed audio (aka: computer audio or VoIP). I think it's a fantastic option for your audience and I always prefer giving my listeners a choice of hearing their presenters via telephone or computer. In recent webinars where the audience had such options, I have seen anywhere up to 75-85% choosing to listen over their computers.

But if I am forced to make an either/or choice of one audio delivery method, the phone wins every time. Computer-delivered audio can work very well. The majority of your audience may have a perfectly acceptable experience. But over the course of many, many webinars using a variety of web conferencing technologies, I have never hosted or delivered a webinar with streamed audio where at least a few audience members didn't complain about the sound quality. It's inevitable, given enough people listening.

Some audience members have slower computers, or they are running applications that conflict with the audio reception and playback. Internet connections get busy and slow down. Data packets get lost and have to be retransmitted and reassembled. Some people have terrible audio cards and speakers (many rely on the cheap internal speakers built into their laptops). There are too many potential problem areas to ensure that your entire audience will receive a quality, uninterrupted broadcast.

As a technical moderator, there isn't much you can do when someone writes in that they can't hear the audio cleanly or at all. Diagnosing and troubleshooting an audio reception problem is impossible when you are working a full webinar audience. That's why I love having the fallback of "Why don't you just dial in to the telephone conference line." It's quick and easy.

Some vendors force the presenters to deliver their audio via a computer-connected microphone. This always makes me shiver when I see the requirement. I know what's coming... cheap, low quality computer headsets being pressed into action (or worse: stand-up desk microphones). Attempts to configure audio properties by people who aren't used to dealing with such things. Technical troubleshooting sessions examining issues of compatibility with operating systems and input devices. Ugh. When I am hosting a panel of guest speakers, letting them use their comfortable old telephones gives me one less item to deal with.

There are several benefits to using streaming audio, and I appreciate them. The cost can be much lower than providing a telephone conference line, especially if you have an international audience. Participants away from a convenient phone line can still listen in. It does away with an additional setup item for you (scheduling the phone conference line) and eliminates an additional set of instructions for your audience on how to connect with the phone conference. Those are all good things.

Streaming audio is also the best way to work with an embedded video clip as part of your presentation. With a phone conference, you can never be sure when your entire audience has finished seeing the video playback and you can start talking again. Some will be done early and listening to silence, while others are angry that you have begun talking over the end of their video. When you deliver your audio over the same integrated data stream as your video, it all gets buffered together to present a smooth flow to your audience. Sure, they might be anywhere from half a second to ten seconds behind you, but at least they get all the content in the right order in a steady stream delivered at the rate their machine can deal with it.

Unfortunately that same buffering delay factor can cause problems in interactivity with your audience. If you issue a poll or invite audience responses via feedback panels or typed chat, you want to react in real time to their inputs. If you have to wait for ten seconds after you have asked them to participate in order for them to hear your request and take action, it creates an uncomfortable dead spot. You can talk through the waiting period, but it tends to slow things down and drags out the very parts of the webinar that should be the most stimulating for your audience.

As with everything else in the webinar world, there are tradeoffs in the way each vendor implements their technology and your priorities will drive your selection. Hopefully this note has given you some pointers that will help you make an informed decision that is right for you and your audiences.

Technorati Tags: webinar , web conference , web conferencing , VoIP , audio conferencing , webcasting , webcast , streaming audio

Webinar Attendance Rates Revisited

People continue to ask me about what they should expect in terms of attendance versus registration on their webinars. There is not a single answer, as averages vary based on a number of factors.

For general open-call marketing or lead generation webinars where you are soliciting attendance from the public at large, you can usually count on about a 33% attendance rate. That's right... 2/3 of your projected audience won't show up. So if you are in the game merely to build up quantities of names in your raw lead list, you might as well put all of your effort into getting folks to complete the event registration form.

If you have a highly targeted audience with a specialized interest, you can expect higher attendance rates. I'm working with a client giving webinars to software programmers on a specific platform in a niche area of development. We are seeing attendance rates averaging 50% (we recently did an event with a 55% attendance ratio). The narrower your content focus and audience demographic, the more likely they are to listen to your message. Unfortunately, you have less of a starting pool to draw from!

Customer communications events (such as "sneak peeks" at new product release features and so on) do a little better. I would estimate about a 60-65 percent attendance rate. The more that people believe they are getting inside information rather than a sales/marketing pitch, the more effort they will put into attending.

Internal training and employee communications (even "mandatory"

events) can climb as high as 80-85% attendance, but there will always be some MIA's in the crowd.

Your highest attendance rates (naturally) come from events where you charge the audience to attend. Especially if you announce a no-refund policy!  :) These can produce attendance rates around 95-98%. But you'd better deliver on some quality content, technical operation, and presentation skills.

 

Technorati Tags: webinar , web conferencing , web conference , attendance rates , marketing , webcast , webcasting

Working With WebEx Fall 2007

Technorati Tags: WebEx , web conference , web conferencing , webinar , Event Center

My last post talked about the new WebEx release in the abstract. I have had a chance to use the new features in Event Center very briefly and I thought I would do a follow-up with my initial impressions and experiences.

My first test was to upload my feared "PowerPoint Torture Test" and see if they had fixed a bug I reported in conversion of some filled and rotated objects. Yes, they had! They also passed all my animation tests... Something that very few providers manage. And they properly converted a piece of WordArt that trips up most conversion programs. But I managed to find a remaining bug in display of an animated image, so I can't give WebEx a 100% pass. Still, it's likely to handle almost anything you throw at it on a PowerPoint slide.

Network Based Recording was something I had been waiting for from WebEx for a very long time. Recording integrated audio/video presentations was a horrendous experience in past releases. I gave it a shot and was pleased to see that it worked very well. Recording options were relatively easy to set and audio quality was adequate for web streaming. I was able to hear some dropouts and compression in the recording, which happens whenever a vendor sacrifices quality for speed and file size in their recording files.

The recording is available immediately after your presentation ends. There is no conversion and processing delay. I had a hard time at first finding the recording in my administration console, but I eventually got to the right place.

On playback, the audience can select whether they want to see supplemental panels such as chat, Q&A, and participant names. I was bothered by the fact that there didn't seem to be a way to hide these from viewers... Privacy can be a serious issue in a public event and I don't necessarily want the world to see the names of others who attended and what they typed in. I called tech support, and I was told there was no practical way to avoid this (other than a convoluted multi-machine approach). Then I got a message from the product management team saying that I could enable or disable display of those items from the recording properties controls. This confused me because I had already looked at the recording properties and didn't see any such options.

It turns out that you can see the same recording listed in your files in two separate lists. Each list points to the same file on the network, each offers you the ability to play or download the file. But if you click on "Properties" from one list, you get the full set of options, and if you click on "Properties" from the other list, you only get to see and edit the title and description! Now where's the sense in that?

You can download a recording file to your local PC, but it comes down in a new proprietary format different from WebEx's past two recording formats. The new file extension is .ARF, which is going to lead to plenty of jokes about this being a real dog. To play back the recording offline, you need to download and install another piece of application software from WebEx. The great thing about the offline player is that it also lets you do a one-click conversion of the recording to your choice of Flash or Windows Media 9 (WMV) format. The conversion process is a long process (it plays back the entire recording in real time), but you can schedule it to run at a time of your choosing.

WebEx also changed the behavior of teleconferencing for audience members. I set up an event with both integrated telephone and streaming audio broadcasting. Audience members automatically get the computer audio broadcast started when they join. But it took a while on the phone with a surprised and uncertain tech support guy to find that audience members now have to click a telephone request button on their console to join the telephone conference. By default, the host has to notice a very small icon next to their name and approve the request, at which time the audience member can see the previously hidden telephone join instructions. I stumbled around and managed to find an option to automatically approve telephone join requests, which simplified things a bit. Still, this seems like a lot of extra work for both the audience and the host.

I created a custom survey and displayed it at the end of the event. While you can place a wide variety of fields on the survey (Text, radio buttons, drop-downs, check boxes, etc) and you can throw a small image at the top (such as a company logo), there isn't much opportunity to customize the look of the form. I found the field sizes to be needlessly small and the form looked very blocky and utilitarian.

I ran my test event and completed a survey and then came back as the site administrator and started looking for the results. I was bemused to find no mention in any of the help files about where the survey results appear. I checked through the "My Files" archives and other likely places. Again, my tech support rep seemed undertrained on the new features of this release and he went off to do some tests. We finally decided that the results would appear on the attendance report, but that isn't available for many hours after the event. I have been rechecking my test events and while I can see the column names for the survey questions, I don't see any values entered, so the jury is still out on this one. For now you may be better off creating an external form and guiding your attendees to it through a web URL push. I like the idea of associating the answers with the other attendee info you collect, but it feels like there is work to do in order to make this fully operational and useful.

So for day one, I'd say I'm guardedly happy. Things generally work the way I think they should, but there are areas where some additional design work would pay off. The online help files need a little more updating to address questions about the new features and I'd say the tech support team needs to work with the new features some more. Those are all common complaints about new software releases and every software company I worked for in the past was guilty of the same things from time to time. I expect that some additional time working with the release and some quiet and unpublicized point releases behind the scenes will probably clear them up.

WebEx Gets An Update

WebEx issued an uncharacteristically long press release today announcing an upgrade to their web collaboration products. The length wasn't the only thing unusual about this announcement. There are a number of interesting facets to it for those who track the company and its communications strategy. [I know... I shouldn't refer to it as "the company" anymore, but they still refer to themselves as if they were an independently operating business, so why should I be any different?]

1) WebEx has traditionally made its product releases quietly available to users. They don't make a big deal out of release names or numbers. That's one of the advantages of Software as a Service (SaaS)... Customers don't need to care when the software is updated because there is nothing to reinstall [Talk about an oversimplification!]

But this release goes into great detail about feature enhancements and additions, going so far as to give it a formal release name: "WebEx Fall 2007". I think that sounds like a designer's line of garments at a fashion show. Do you really want to start giving software releases names that have to change with the seasons?  Because WebEx updates things all the time, and no doubt will again within short order, you will find that nobody on the operational side of things uses that marketing term for the release. For them, it is the WBS 26 release, following on naturally from the WBS 25 release. If you are a current customer, you can check your release number by looking at your Downloads page, which contains current version information.

2) WebEx tends to talk about their products in public communications grouped under the WebEx name ("Use WebEx for your collaboration requirements") unless they are spotlighting an individual product in a customer win or something similar.

This announcement takes great pains to showcase and differentiate the five collaboration products that WebEx sells. That's a good thing, as people often don't realize that there are different feature requirements for different applications. I don't want the same behavior in my software when I am hosting a small group collaborative brainstorming session as when I am hosting a public lead generation marketing event. It's one of the things I like about the way WebEx approaches the conferencing space.

I spoke with Grace Kim, the Senior Manager for Product Marketing, a couple of weeks ago to get an overview of the new release and to hear her take on the most important features. She called attention to the following items:

Uploaded PowerPoint presentations now preserve text entered in the Notes field on your slides. A presenter can reference the notes in a pop-up window that the audience can't see. This can eliminate shuffling papers and having to split focus between the screen and your desk.

Meeting Center and Training Center now allow display of up to six "talking head" live video feeds. Event Center doesn't support all that bandwidth because of the potential for huge audience sizes.

Network Based Recording (NBR) allows you to record the combined audio and video presentation without having to use local hardware capture to your PC. Recordings can be stored and managed on WebEx's servers. You can set options to automatically record all meetings on a site. (NBR is HUGE and long overdue.)

You can create custom surveys that are automatically displayed for attendees when an event ends. Surveys can include scores or weights on different answers to help prioritize leads. Results are included in attendance reports, automatically associated with the respondent information.

There are some new HTML email templates.

Sales Center lets you create custom portals for different client accounts that can be accessed without invitation.

Training Center has new testing capabilities. Students can take tests multiple times and autosave responses as they go. If you have courses with limited enrollment, students can waitlist and cancel their registration.

Support Center has new console choices for remote support operators with a quick chat feature to bring in the first available agent, a custom chat phrase library, and web-based Automatic Call Distribution. These are features traditionally associated with dedicated automated support software systems.

All this is good stuff and customers should be happy. Read on to part two to check out my initial experiences using the new release.

Technorati Tags: WebEx , Meeting Center , Training Center , Support Center , Event Center , Sales Center , webinar , web conference , web conferencing , Grace Kim

More Innovative Marketing From WebEx

WebEx is trying out an interesting new marketing strategy in India. They have installed an electronic kiosk inside the Bangalore airport waiting lounge. Bored business travelers waiting for a flight can get a demo of WebEx's product offerings.

According to a news report in the Indian press, WebEx says they have pulled about 600 "legitimate registrations" so far from the kiosk and they are planning to install similar stations at the airports in Delhi and Mumbai.

I think this is a great strategy if you've got the money. It reminds me of the highway billboards for housing developments that say "If you lived here, you'd be home now." WebEx is saying "If you used our product, you would already be in your meeting."

They are catching the right audience at the right time to be receptive. Good job!

Technorati Tags: WebEx , webinar , web conferencing , marketing