The Webinar Blog

Dimdim Expands Functionality

Dimdim officially released version 6 of its web conferencing solution today. Combined with their announcement of Dimdim Business two weeks ago, it means significantly more options and more capabilities for users in organizations of varying sizes.

I wrote up my impressions last year of Dimdim Webinar and their unique Webinar Widget. The latest enhancements deserve a new look.

Dimdim has employed a multi-prong approach to building usage and revenues (not necessarily both at the same time). They offer a free version of their web conferencing product that is useful for smaller web meetings with up to 10 participants. Hopefully, the familiarity and satisfaction with that version will drive users to purchase licenses allowing larger room capacity, branding, secure meetings, polling, and other functionality. At a slightly higher price point, users can license Dimdim Webinar, which adds the embeddable countdown and registration widget, much larger meeting sizes, and meeting reports.

Hidden from the eyes of the general public, Dimdim also has a revenue stream based on letting other conferencing vendors OEM their platform and offer it under a different brand name and cosmetics. These vendors have been able to add some value-add functionality by expanding capabilities and integration through programming interfaces.

DIMDIM BUSINESS

When I talked to Dimdim’s CMO, Steve Chazin, he told me that the new Dimdim Business offering was an attempt to bridge the gap between Dimdim’s one-license, one-user meeting rooms and the custom OEM solutions targeted at large enterprises. Useful for small to mid-sized business organizations, it allows multiple meeting host users under a single license. Dimdim Business also adds centralized administration and customization features that let a business better control and track how the outside world interacts with the company’s meetings.

Dimdim Business meeting rooms have a 100-person capacity (unless you choose to also license the Webinar option to go up to 1000). The platform in this configuration lets companies perform more extensive branding and cosmetic customization, creating “skins,” changing text labels, customizing onscreen messages, altering the default email templates that meeting hosts see, and so on. It also provides a business-specific high level URL for the meeting rooms, rather than a subdomain under the Dimdim identifier. A single business license can be shared between 2-10 named meeting rooms under central administration. The collaboration coordinator for the company can manage user administration and get company-level reports on utilization at the event or user level.

Dimdim Business also allows access to the API calls that the OEMs use to build their custom versions. This means that a motivated enough company could create their own specialized web conferencing solution with integrations to other company systems.

The final piece that deserves mention with Dimdim Business is that account holders are treated specially when it comes to support needs. Each Business client gets a dedicated account rep and priority support. Upon request, Dimdim will put a support person on call if you have a critical meeting, to ensure that if there is a problem, they are on top of it instantly.

VERSION 6

Today’s new Version 6 release enhances functionality across the entire set of Dimdim offerings, from Free up to Business (except where noted). I’ll briefly address each of the new capabilities.

Screen sharing now allows a choice of showing a rectangular region or a named application as options beyond the full-desktop share that was previously mandatory. These additional options are not available in the Free version. Screen sharing defaults to full-desktop, but you can change the starting mode as a preferences option.

They also added a new way to get into a screen sharing session without starting up a Dimdim web meeting. Hosts can elect to download and install a program on their computer (available for Windows or Mac). Once installed, the application can be brought up at any time to instantly make the host’s desktop visible on the web. Then you give other people your dedicated URL and they can track what you are doing. This is naturally considered a “quick ‘n dirty” version of collaboration that would typically be used in conjunction with a phone conversation or Skype call. There is no password security under this sharing method, as anyone with the URL can see the shared space.

But the nice thing is that if you realize you need more functionality than the simple screen share, the host can quickly transition into a normal Dimdim meeting with public and private chat, whiteboard, and video. There is no need to access an account page or start a meeting through an administrative console.

Speaking of video, paid accounts can now show webcam images from up to four meeting participants at a time. Cosmetics and functionality of the video manipulation interface are much better, allowing each person to expand the video image to full screen, pause his or her webcam, and swap which camera view is displayed larger than the others.

A new Resource Manager lets hosts queue up display content (PowerPoint, Word, Excel) before a session. The Office document gets converted to a format that Dimdim displays quickly. This also lets hosts share the electronic file versions with participants (who get a rather long and unwieldy download link). Documents can be password protected for greater security.

The new release boosted polling functionality a bit, but I have to say that it is still primitive compared to many other web conferencing solutions on the market. This is not Dimdim’s strong suit. Polls are single-answer only, with up to five answer options allowed. Results are shown in bar graph format and always show the absolute number of votes. This is inconvenient for hosts who want to pretend like they have a larger audience than they really do. Polls can be created ahead of time and stored, ready for use in a meeting. Hosts can elect to show results or keep them private, and poll results per participant are recorded for administrative reporting after the event.

Possibly the most fun new feature is something Dimdim calls Web Mashups. That name may be a little unclear, but the functionality is easy to grasp. A host can elect to share a YouTube video by typing in the standard YouTube viewing URL. Instead of seeing the full YouTube web page for the video with advertisements, comments, descriptions, and the YouTube margins, participants simply see the video window itself in the meeting room. They each watch it from the source server… The video content isn’t uploaded and redelivered through Dimdim’s servers. That should allow for the best possible speed, but it also means (as with almost all video clip solutions) that different participants may be susceptible to buffering, thus taking shorter or longer total viewing times to get to the end of the video. This is always a problem for web conference hosts, as you don’t exactly know when it’s safe to start talking again.

But wait… It’s not just YouTube. Any web page that includes an embed code for HTML delivery of the content can be shown this way. Dimdim grabs the embed code and shows the content. They like using Picasa web albums as an example. You can show your guests an entire slideshow directly from your already uploaded Picasa web account.

Dimdim is an intriguing web conferencing offering. It has flexible platform choices to suit varying needs. It has a free version to try out capabilities without financial risk and to learn the ropes. It is probably the lowest cost solution available for large webinar-sized meeting rooms of 1000 participants (I have to hedge because vendors seem to change their pricing daily!). With the Business version, it can even be used as a customization base to create your own privatized version of a web conferencing platform.

At the price levels they advertise and for the properly targeted use scenarios, Dimdim offers a compelling cost-value proposition. It is definitely not the most sophisticated web event solution on the market, nor would they ever make that claim. Its sweet spot is low barrier to adoption, a fast learning curve, and ease of use for simple meetings. Professionals looking for advanced capabilities in registration, attendee management, polling, reporting and recording options may opt to look for higher-end products, but you’ll definitely pay more and have more things to manage.

Technorati Tags: Dimdim,webinar,web seminar,web meeting,online meeting,web conference,web conferencing,Steve Chazin

ConnectSolutions Podium Emphasizes Video Webcasting

ConnectSolutions announced a new webcast product offering today. I got an early demo of the new Podium platform last week, but I have not used it on a real webcast, so my impressions are driven from a vendor-controlled walkthrough and discussions with the CEO, Michael Fitzpatrick.

Although Michael and ConnectSolutions have a history of web collaboration offerings based on the Adobe Connect product (thus the company name), Podium is a completely new piece of software, independently created and supported by ConnectSolutions. It has nothing to do with Adobe or Adobe Connect.

Podium is primarily designed for large audience webcasts with a heavy emphasis on live video of presenters in a single location – probably in a studio or controlled video production room. I see representative examples as including: Official corporate announcements; Large enterprise investor relations webcasts; Experts on panel discussions; Government presentations to the public. Michael says that they have already run events with 10,000 participants and they feel comfortable supporting 50,000 person webcasts.

Podium takes an interesting approach in that it requires the use of a third-party encoder to create a Flash audio/video stream of any content you want to transmit. This differs from other webcast products such as ON24, Stream57, and Vivu, as well as all major webinar-oriented technologies. Those have integrated encoders, which allows a presenter to simply click on a function such as “Share my desktop” or “Show my webcam” or “Display my PowerPoint slides.” Podium doesn’t know about those content sources. It relies on getting a digital content stream that has already been assembled from the desired sources. That sentence may be confusing if you are unfamiliar with the concept of streaming encoders. It does not mean you have to create your content ahead of time and record it for later use in your web session. You can still do things on the fly such as show the video from your camera while you speak on the live session, show web pages, or do software demonstrations. You can move through PowerPoint or KeyNote slides on your computer.

But it means that the presenter’s computer must feed its display content into a program such as Wirecast, ViewCast Niagara, or Flash Media Live Encoder. These programs turn the locally displayed information into a digital signal suitable for transmitting over the Web.

Once Podium has the stream content, it does a great job of pushing it out to each participant’s computer. I saw a crystal clear video image even in full screen display. There was no buffering, no stuttering, no motion artifacts. When Michael showed his desktop, he was able to smoothly scroll entire screens of text up and down and I saw it move as smoothly as if I were looking at his physical screen. There was absolutely zero “poll and redraw” breaks in the action. I asked how Podium deals with slower connections among different audience members. Michael told me that the software constantly checks each participant’s available bandwidth and performance and dynamically scales the transmitted video stream up or down in quality to create a smooth image. I would need to test a slow connection, but I would expect the image to get progressively fuzzier, “blockier”, and less smooth as connection bandwidth decreased.

I have mentioned Flash a number of times so far. If you own an iPhone or iPad, you know this means you are out of luck, as Apple refuses to support Flash on their mobile devices. But ConnectSolutions allows mobile devices to receive an H.264 MPEG video stream instead of Flash, opening attendance to people with Apple devices.

Podium uses the concept of “panels” to display additional features for audience members. A series of icons at the bottom of the screen toggle panels on and off in vertical strips next to the main content display area, which shrinks or expands accordingly.

Q&A lets audience members ask questions in a moderated queue that only the presenters can see. A presenter can answer a question privately to the asker or publicly to the entire audience (the original question is displayed along with the answer).

Another panel allows public chat, where audience members can have a freeform text conversation with all other audience members. At this time there is no facility allowing private conversations between individuals.

An event information panel can display any HTML compatible source that the producers want to create. This could be text, links to web documents, social media integration, or static graphics such as logos.

Another panel option (producers can decide which panels they want to make available for an event) is a “Scratchpad” which lets audience members jot private notes as they listen and then save the notes as a PDF or email them for later reference. I like the general idea of this feature, but I found the implementation to be a bit restrictive, with each note persisting as a time stamped individual entity. I wanted more flexibility to reorder, edit, or delete notes as new relationships and thoughts occurred to me.

In addition to the panels, Podium lets producers create announcement messages that pop up and overlay the main video display area in the lower left corner of the screen. In this initial implementation, the announcement window is fixed in size and position. While it allows full HTML code - permitting links, graphics, and formatting – there is no facility for creating a library of predesigned announcements that can be selected and displayed. If you want to build and test a fancy announcement overlay ahead of time, you have to copy and paste your HTML code into the editor during your event. There is also no way for audience members to go back and see an announcement that has disappeared.

Michael was very proud of an innovative feature for collecting post-event feedback. Instead of just displaying a survey or poll, producers can display a page that lets attendees record audio/video messages for the producers/presenters. This is a cute selling feature, but I am cynical about its practicality. The number of audience members with audio/video hardware hooked up and ready to record their commentary is going to be only a subset of the entire audience. And having a library full of video responses is very difficult to summarize, edit, or quickly look through for specific keywords or important statements in the middle of a lot of other filler. We’ll see how it turns out in real use by customers.

Some of the features I am used to in formal web event products are not implemented yet. There is no facility for audience polling during an event, no prioritization or markup of questions that have been submitted, and no registration management (build registration pages, send confirmation & reminder emails). Currently an event has a single login link for all attendees, and ConnectSolutions assumes you will use a third party registration system to get viewer info and send them instructions and communications.

Michael says that they will support single event pricing if desired by a customer, but the more common licensing model will be flat rate annual subscriptions allowing unlimited use of the product for audience sizes up to a predetermined maximum.

ConnectSolutions Podium is clearly going to appeal most strongly to large organizations with technical support staff who can install, manage, and use streaming encoders as well as creating HTML-heavy panel and announcement information. It will be used in a centralized presentation location and all presenters on a webcast will come to that location. Its main strengths include excellent video display performance, a simple interface for audience members, large audience scalability, and the flexibility to reach non-Flash mobile devices.

Technorati Tags: ConnectSolutions,ConnectSolutions Podium,webcasting,webcast,web event,online event

Marshall McLuhan And Web Conferencing

“The medium is the message.” One of the most quoted five-word phrases in the last 45 years. I’ll bet you think you know what it implies. I’ll bet you’re wrong.

I just finished reading an erudite and fascinating article by Mark Federman, Chief Strategist, McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology. The article has the unwieldy title of “What is the Meaning of The Medium is the Message?”

Federman says that McLuhan wasn’t making a point about specific communication channels such as television, radio, or motion pictures. He certainly wasn’t downplaying the importance of content. McLuhan was trying to open our eyes to unanticipated changes in the architecture of societal and interpersonal interactions that accompany new innovations that extend our personal reach.

Read the article. My goal isn’t to paraphrase someone else’s analysis of yet another person’s work. I would like to see if we can apply the ideas to webinars and look at ways in which the technological introduction of the medium has changed the message of how we interact. I think that some of the common dissatisfaction with webinars from an audience viewpoint stems from producers and presenters still thinking in terms of older, obsolete messages of communicative dynamics.

There are questions I see all the time from webinar creators and administrators. Some common ones include:

• How long should a webinar be?
• How do I hold my audience’s attention?
• What’s a good audience size?

I see an underlying communications message in these questions that is based on a prior medium. Communicating to a large target audience used to mean flying them to a central location, setting up a room, and speaking from a podium. Logistics were incredibly important and had to be worked out long in advance to allow travel arrangements, venue bookings, deposits, meal planning, and a hundred other details. Audience members who made the significant investment in time and money to attend were looking for value justification, usually measured in units of “hours of presentation time.” Presenters and show hosts looked out over the sea of faces and tried to figure out how to keep them from nodding off. A successful event filled the room or at least covered the planner’s setup minimums.

Webinars extend our communications reach to that audience in a new way. And the change in the medium changes the dynamics of the message between hosts, presenters, and audience members. There is no more sea of faces. There is a multitude of simultaneous one-to-one communications between a presenter and an individual listener.

Information value now is measured in density rather than duration. Online audiences want maximum value delivered in the minimum time necessary to convey it. Then they want to customize the conversation to their interests through a dialog. So instead of concentrating on “How much time do I need to reserve before it is seen as worth the trip?” we need to ask “How much time do we really need in order to deliver the value we promised?” Don’t be afraid to end a session early. Or at least end the lecture quickly and move to audience-guided questions and discussion.

Online audiences are not captive, and the alternative to interest is not sleep. They are going to multitask, and they will abandon the presentation without remorse. So instead of “How do I hold my audience’s attention?” we need to ask, “How do I repeatedly restimulate interest and recapture attention that has wandered elsewhere?”

Instead of viewing the audience as a mass entity defined by its size, we need to present to an audience of one. Presenters must address the individual and value the individual’s attention and participation.

Notice that none of this changes the importance of your “message”… the content and the value in your presentation. That is always critical and neither McLuhan nor I would want you to minimize it. But understanding and accommodating the new dynamics of this medium will keep it from becoming associated with a message of frustration and uselessness.

Technorati Tags: Marshall McLuhan,medium is the message,Mark Federman,webinar,web seminar,online seminar,online meeting,web meeting,web conference,web conferencing,webcasting,webcast

ViVu Webcasting Gets Faster And Bigger

The latest newsletter emailing from ViVu mentioned a pair of enhancements I wanted to check out. I have written about ViVu’s video webcasting platform before: Once in 2009 for a general backgrounder and again in January of this year when they added VuRoom as a Skype extension.

In my tests of the latest version, I found that ViVu has changed several things that bothered me in my previous writeups. You no longer see identifier labels randomly flashing on top of the video windows. Using VuRoom with Skype is now easy and clear… You elect to start a video call as you normally would with Skype and if VuRoom is installed, it gives you a popup dialog window asking if you would like to use VuRoom for your video connection.

But the biggest changes were obvious performance improvements. Video windows were crisp and responsive. It was interesting to see via a status check functionality that ViVu starts the video quality fairly low and then gradually raises it as it tests your bandwidth performance. This is automatic and the user doesn’t need to adjust any settings, although there are more powerful controls over camera speed and image size for the inveterate tweakers out there. Even though I was using a webcam and ViVu for video, while using a headset and Skype for audio, the two streams were perfectly synchronized (which is no mean trick).

Desktop sharing has also undergone a massive enhancement. In my previous writeup I mentioned a lag time of 4 seconds on full screen shares. In my new testing, I saw full screen sharing with practically no lag time, even on full screen redraws. I watched the presenter display a web page full of dense text and smoothly scroll it up and down. I could see the scroll taking place, instead of successive redraws in jumps and starts. I had the presenter display a PowerPoint in full screen mode and go through large animation effects such as slide transitions. You could actually see the transitions taking place, which is almost unheard of in this functionality.

As a presenter, I found screen sharing to be very easy to initiate and control. Many products force you to select whether you plan to show your entire screen or a region. ViVu starts screen sharing in full screen mode and you can quickly and easily drag the borders of the sharing frame inward to share a smaller region of your screen. You can drag the sharing rectangle around your screen to show any desired section.

The new screen magnification feature is just as intuitive and easy. You click a “magnifying glass” icon and see a red rectangle. It is a fixed size that you can’t change. As you move the rectangle frame around your screen, anything within that frame is magnified on your attendees’ screens. Click the magnifying glass again and you’re back to the normal view of your desktop.

Yes, it is possible to get similar functionality by downloading and installing applications on your PC and then running them while inside a screen sharing session. But ViVu’s integration of the feature makes it easier to call up, makes it more intuitive for inexperienced presenters, and eliminates the need to manage multiple software programs to do the job. I really liked having this additional option, and as far as I can remember, it is unique to ViVu. Now if they can just add the same functionality to their display of uploaded PowerPoint slides, they will really satisfy my demands!

Although ViVu is scalable to handle very large audience sizes in meetings, it still doesn’t contain registration capabilities or attendee communications (confirmations, reminders, followup emails). Currently you need to create a universal login link and then use a third party service such as EventBrite to manage registrations and reminders. That’s a bit unfortunate for the formal webcast event space, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see them address this functionality in the future. As it is, the video and screen sharing performance make it worth evaluating if those are priorities for you.

Technorati Tags: ViVu,VuRoom,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing,web meeting,online meeting,online conference,screen sharing,desktop sharing

Dealing With Flash For Webinar Participants

I got a pop-up notice on the computer this morning that my Adobe Flash Player wanted to update itself to a newer version. The brief overview bullet points said something about improved video performance and increased security. I try to always keep my Flash Player at the most recent level, but that can mean quite a few updates per year. They seem to be coming more frequently lately, as Adobe discovers and fixes security vulnerabilities.

Since more and more web conferencing products are using Flash as an underlying platform, it is very important for presenters and attendees to upgrade their version of the software before a conference. If you are the administrator for your webinars, make sure to check with your web conference vendor to find out the minimum version number of Flash that they support for presenters or attendees. Obviously this doesn’t concern you if you use a non-Flash conferencing product.

I usually add text such as the following to my initial registration confirmation message and login instructions for attendees. You are welcome to steal this as is or modify it for use in your own webinar communications. The instructions are more complex than they should need to be for a consumer product. Thanks a bunch, Adobe!

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ADDITIONAL TECHNICAL INFORMATION

Our conferencing software uses Adobe's Flash Player software, which should already be installed on your computer. Please check the version you have installed as follows:

1) Go to www.adobe.com/software/flash/about  
In a box titled "Version Information" it will tell you which version you currently have on your computer. If the number is smaller than x.x.xx, you need to upgrade. It is a good idea to upgrade to the latest version anyway for the best performance and security.

2) Click in the second paragraph on that page where it says "Player Download Center". On the new page, uncheck the box that wants to give you a Free Google Toolbar, and click the big yellow button to "Agree and install now". Everything else should be automatic and you can try the version test again to check the installation.

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Technorati Tags: Adobe Flash,Flash Player,webinar,web conference,web conferencing,web seminar,web meeting,online meeting,online seminar,webcasting,webcast

Quick Webinar Tip – Opening Slides

Here’s the quick webinar tip of the day… Your title slide is for displaying while people join your conference. It’s a placeholder that tells them they are in the right place and properly connected.

The second you start talking about your content, you should move off that title slide. It’s a visual indication that goes along with your audio, letting people know that you have started.

Don’t sit on your title slide, talking about what’s coming up. Get some visual action happening as soon as possible.

(By the way, if people have been sitting there looking at your title slide for 2, 5, 10 minutes… The first thing they hear from you does NOT need to be the title of your webinar!)

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,web meeting,online seminar,online meeting,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing

Learn How To Build A Marketing PowerPoint

I am presenting a new topic in my series of free educational webinars with Adobe. This Thursday, August 12, I will present “A Guide To Building Effective Marketing Presentations.”

I will be talking about how to design PowerPoint slides that help fulfill marketing goals. Although my focus is naturally on presentations given via webinar, the tips really apply to marketing presentations given in any physical context.

As always, I promise that if you make the commitment to attend you will get real pointers and real value… Not just some thinly disguised pitch to pay for a longer course or consulting services. It’s free to attend and Adobe is very good about keeping their own product marketing out of the content. They offer a completely separate product briefing after my webinar is over for people who want to learn more about the Adobe Connect web conferencing platform I’ll be using. If you aren’t interested in that part, you don’t have to see a single slide about it.

The webinar is scheduled for one hour starting at 10am USA Pacific / 1pm USA Eastern. To check the time conversion to other locations, use this link: http://bit.ly/beTbts 

I won’t be talking about webinar setup, promoting your event, or lead management. This is all about crafting the presentation content itself. Before starting Webinar Success, I was director of product marketing at a Silicon Valley software company and spent many years building and editing marketing presentations. I thought it would be fun to share my perspective on what works in marketing webinars.

Here’s the direct URL to register: http://bit.ly/0812webinar

Technorati Tags: Adobe,Adobe Connect,marketing,marketing presentation,webinar,web seminar,web conferencing,web conference,webcasting,webcast,online seminar,online marketing,web marketing

The 7 Deadly Sins Of Webinars

In Situ Digital has created a short humorous video with examples of “The 7 Deadly Sins of Webinars.” I probably would have said the sins were more about webcasts, since several of the tips are about appearing properly on camera, which is much more common in webcasts than webinars. But that’s just lexical nitpicking.

The video gives some good, quick tactical advice in a way that makes it fun to watch. And you get the extra benefit of listening to a classy BBC-style English accent (In Situ is based in the UK).

The video doesn’t call attention to itself, but if you study the production techniques, you’ll see how you can make a very professional and polished production without a lot of fancy camera work and locations. It is shot in a studio with a single fixed camera and uses a chroma-keyed background to feed in a visual behind the presenter (with humorous effects). In Situ shows off the fact that they are comfortable doing digital inserts and a special effect at the end, but mostly it’s just a matter of short takes edited together with proper sound and sequencing.

What’s the difference between this and your typical desk webcam presentation? The lighting is bright enough to see details without casting shadows or catching hot spots on the presenters’ faces. The sound is caught with a professional microphone and holds a steady volume. The presenters are always properly in frame and in focus. And the background doesn’t pull your focus away from the presenters. If more video presentations followed only those simple guidelines, it would go a long way to making online video presentations more palatable and acceptable as business tools.

If your feed reader doesn’t allow hyperlinks, here is a URL you can copy and paste into your browser: http://bit.ly/7webcastsins

Definitely worth your time.

Technorati Tags: In Situ Digital,webcasting,webcast,webinar,web conference,web conferencing,video production,video tips,video techniques

Record/Playback Within A Webinar

A trainer recently asked me for the ability to do something in an online session that is common in local training… Get an audio/video recording of a student and immediately play it back for commentary and skills refinement.

This is standard practice in learning how to conduct on-camera interviews, public speaking, or other personal interaction skills. Nothing helps students like seeing themselves as others see them. In a classroom, you simply set up a video recorder, do the exercise, rewind, and play it back on a monitor. No muss, no fuss. Instant feedback.

But I started thinking about all the web conferencing packages I work with and I don’t think any of them have this capability. Can you record an audio/video window of a participant and instantly make it available for playback within the same session, with pause/continue/rewind controls?

If you know of a web collaboration product with this functionality, please add a comment so we can all benefit. If nobody offers it, I think it’s needed.

Technorati Tags: online training,web training,web conference,web conferencing,webinar,web seminar,online seminar

iLinc Adds Product Enhancements

The latest iLinc newsletter summarized recent enhancements to their web conferencing products and support.

My favorite addition is a System Status Page. I wish every hosted application had this. It quickly shows whether their servers and systems are running normally from their end so if you have connection problems as a user, you can first see if it’s local to you or a system-wide problem before calling support. I honestly don’t know why every SaaS vendor doesn’t implement this. It would cut down on their volume of panicked support calls in times of crisis, when you need everyone concentrating on fixing the problem.

The support page also lists planned system maintenance and something labeled “Recent Status Notifications.” I’m not actually sure what goes there. I’d love to see a list of recent bug fixes or product updates, since these are almost impossible to track in a hosted application when you don’t have any control over or knowledge of product enhancements. Sometimes a new code change can have unexpected side effects, and if I suddenly see something behaving differently than I’m used to, it’s great to see whether there is an explanation from the vendor’s side.

iLinc also announced “iLinc for Outlook”- a downloadable application that you install on your local computer. It adds integration with Outlook 2003/2007 (2010 is promised for a later release). Using the add-in lets you schedule web meetings and send invitations directly from Outlook.

The last announced addition isn’t really a part of the product at all. iLinc just started a new Service Innovator Blog, with the announced intention of delivering “politely obsessive service for customers.” I like that phrase.

As I have stated many times in these pages, I’m always delighted to report on enhancements and announcements about webinar software. Send me the latest and greatest for your product so I can help spread the word.

Technorati Tags: iLinc,System Status Page,Service Innovator Blog,webinar,web seminar,web meeting,online seminar,online meeting,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing