In the past week I have received notifications of significant updates to web conferencing software from Digital Samba, ON24, and Webinato. Looks like the vendors are hitting end of year development goals! My Fall/Winter busy season is extending farther into December than usual, so I have not had time to do in-depth examination of the updates, but I'll try to add them to my list for better coverage soon.
As a brief overview, here are some of the announcements.
Digital Samba announced version 4.3.9 of their OnSync web conferencing platform. They point to more than 70 new features, improvements, and fixes. A lot of their focus is directed at making the software more customizable and useful for "white label" rebranding as a product offering from telecommunication companies and content service providers. So some of their improvements are targeted at integration with phone conferencing.
One of the major updates is a new statistics dashboard giving administrators greater visual access to information on usage (both current and historical). They also enabled an option for automatically recording sessions without manual intervention.
I just did a lookup online and discovered that there are OnSync release numbers even later than this announcement, so it looks like their developers are working faster than their marketing team can keep up with!
[UPDATE DEC 18: A new press release just announced version 4.4.1 with additional enhancements. They are busy!]
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ON24 announced a similar wide-ranging set of improvements to their Webcast Elite product line, which is used for their customer webinars. They called attention to new designs and graphics to provide a modern and consistent viewing experience across all supported platforms and devices. Updates to their Presentation Manager XD (PMXD) are supposed to allow greater control and easier tools for presenters to deliver content and manage attendee questions. And the ON24 Analytics Dashboard gets improvements in design, reporting, and navigation of data from live and on-demand presentations.
I'm really interested in exploring this release, since I previously felt that the ON24 presentation tools were lagging behind the wonderful attendee viewing experience. Hopefully this brings both sides of the equation into better balance.
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Webinato is the new name being used for customer-facing operations and the web conferencing product from omNovia. The old omNovia Technologies name will fade into the background for formal business dealings only. They have updated product design and graphics for registration, administration, and live conferencing with the goal of being more modern and more consistent across desktop and mobile devices and platforms.
I was impressed that the company let current users retain their existing room look and feel for a while to update instructions and screen shots or retrain presenters. Rooms can be updated to the new design by account administrators or left to the end of the month for automatic conversion.
