Right now you’ll hear comments from people like “WebEx ScreenShare is quicker than Sametime”, “NetMeeting is better than WebEx”, “Live Meeting ScreenShare is slower than WebEx” but is there anything more to these comments than general impressions and anecdotal evidence? What we need is someone like Ziff Davis labs to do an evaluation and timing of the different solutions. Live Meeting would go up against WebEx and IBM’s hosted Sametime. Sametime would go up against other internally deployable conferencing systems that offer screensharing.
What would it measure? Things like the redraw time for a complete PowerPoint slide to come down from one the hosting machine to the last client in the meeting, based upon things like different screen resolutions and bit depth; performance on networks with slower speeds and latency; audio performance, a tricky one to test without involving some human bias.<
It’s interesting, in years past the question from people always used to be “How long does it take to recalc” or “how many users can I get on this server”, these questions seem to have gone away now, so how about we start a new question for conferencing solution vendors “How long does it take to screenshare a 1280×1024 32bit powerpoint slide to an end user in your software?”
[Via Carl Tyler’s Blog ]
Carl defenilty has a point here. I think the discussion even goes beyond just webconferecing solutions. Around a lot of solutions from the different software / solution vendors there are a lot of different (and often unsubstantiated) opinions and perceptions.
I hope one of the better “IT evaluation shops” picks this up.
