GoToWebinar / GotoMeeting
What I Liked:
- The user-interface was very easy to follow and figure out.
- They offer fully integrated tools for promoting your events, tracking registration, sending automated reminders, etc., although not all of the system emails can be customized as much as I would like.
- The fixed monthly fee was very appealing, because it would allow me to budget for the expense regardless of how many webinars I did per month, or how many people attended. I see that as a big bonus for some nonprofits too.
- They have advanced tools to monitor participants during the webinar. For example, you can tell how long your webinar was the top window on someone’s computer and how often they were working on something else.
- GoToMeeting lets you poll the audience live by presenting multiple choice questions on the screen that participants can click on, giving you instant, compiled feedback about what people think about various topics. Several participants in the webinar I did said they really loved the instant polling feature.
- While all the data on participants is nice after the fact, for me, all of those monitors and icons were in the way during the live event. I couldn’t present the webinar and monitor all those panels at the same time, so they were distractions more than anything else.
- Other than sending in chat messages, there was no way for me to know which specific participants had questions or would like to participate in exercises with me.
- When you record a meeting in GotoMeeting or GotoWebinar, you make a settings choice before the recording starts. You can either save the recording file in Citrix’s proprietary format that requires attendees to download their video codec for playback, or you tell it to convert the recording file to the more standard WMV format (which is what Microsoft Live Meeting does by default). Citrix’s format is more efficient, but if you plan to make the recording generally available to the public, the .wmv (windows media) standard format is much more useful. I chose to enable the conversion to WMV. If you choose to convert to WMV format, the conversion process immediately starts. There is no confirmation dialog and no opportunity to delay the conversion till later. That is significant because the conversion process is extremely resource intensive and can take a very long time. My computer crawed for several hours. I came back to find the conversion progress bar at 100% and “Done” in the conversion dialog box. But my computer was frozen deader than a doornail. I couldn’t even CTRL-ALT-DEL to bring up the Task Manager. I had to do a hardware shutdown and reboot. When I rebooted, I found that I had a nice big 68MB WMV file in my directory, but it wouldn’t play. It had no audio or video properties associated with it. It would not load in any media player (including Citrix’s officially approved converter… Microsoft Expression Encoder 4). It took over 4 minutes to get someone from Citrix Technical Support. They eventually they could say nothing other than “Looks like your file is corrupted. Sorry about that.”-To record the webinar for later viewing, I had to record the audio on my own hard drive, and then allow GoToWebinar to integrate the files. It worked OK, but seems fraught with potential for problems. It also took several hours to convert the recording format to something useful such as .wmv. Otherwise attendees would need to download a codec to view the recording.
- The "free" toll audio conference call service HAD MAJOR PROBLEMS. The quality was poor and it dropped callers. I was wondering how they were able to offer this for "free".
- One of my attendees called customer service to get help joining and no one answered the phone. It rang for 7 minutes and went to voice mail.