WebEx-alternatives ????

[WindWalker]

VP of Marketing has the hots to get this asked him why,
he said-
-to show a few powerpoints to channel partners,
-explain our new e-commerece site(rant-first if you have to walk someone through how do stuff on your website, there are some SERIOUS design issues.Secondly the website is already out there where anyone can see it-pick up the phone and walk them through it-rant off)
-show our shipping schedule to channel partners-it's on our internal network, they don't(and if IT has it's way-will never-as it should be) have a login to our domain. My suggest was to put that on our website has well(with a login)
-other stuff that may come up.

Now the kicker is he wants to sign up for a plan
Cheapest is $75/month/user 5 user minimum required
so if my math is right that's $4500/year

My suggestions are
1. Use NetMeeting, it's free(though our IT guy says-he doesn't want to have to manage another service-this after just getting all new servers, upgrade to AD and Server03(from SBS), a managed firewall/router and a Full T-1(hell we only have 45 users in house and 4 remote peeps)
2. For that little bit of use, send the powerpoints to the channel partners and pick up the phone
3. Use the ad-hoc meeting features of Webex (at .33/min/user for that annual fee of 4.5K we could host close to 45 hours worth of meetings for up to 5 people)
4. I do notice webex has feature called meetmenow (49/year) which may offer enough feature set to keep em happy. Anyone tried it? How is it?
5. Look at competing products(Love some feedback if anyone has tried these)
A. Conferral $20/month or 199 one-time/user up to 10
conference attendees per user
B. Webtrain.com .20/min/user
C. GotoMeeting by Citrix-$49/user/month-up to 10
attendess
D. Live meeting from MS(IT guy and I used placeware at
another job, now rolled into this expensive MS progarm)
E. Have users sign up for free trails at all of them when
and if we need to show something(at 14 days/trial * 30
people that's a lot of free web conferencing

F. Others I'm missing...

Anyone with thoughts or ideas ????

 

[Genx87]

Why don you write up a proposal and submit it for alternatives?
Seems like you have done your homework.

 

[Slugbait]

NetMeeting isn't a service, ECS is a service. Not sure if you can purchase ECS anymore since LiveMeeting was released, but it's worth a shot and I think it's just a one-time purchase. However, it's meant primarily for internal corporate usage, and A/V won't work with peeps on the outside of your firewall unless you open all those UDP ports.

Perhaps your IT guy is thinking of RDS (Remote Desktop Sharing). That feature *is* a service, but you have to manually turn it on, and it's local machine...IT can't manage it.

Otherwise, NetMeeting standalone has great app sharing performance. Years ago I tried WebEx, and shared apps like Photoshop 3.5 was a complete waste of time...for example, clicking the File menu on the host took almost 4 minutes before the menu dropped down on the remote machine. WebEx used a whiteboard overlay for app sharing instead of T.120, and they tweaked it so performance with MSOffice apps was about half as good as NetMeeting performance, but many other apps didn't get tweaks at all. They may have improved their performance since then, I dunno.

 

[DavidO]

Have you looked at Blive? The features can be seen at www.blive.com. It has meeting, demo, and remote control features. It is available as a flat fee $50 a month for unlimited use or a pay per use option. I am a reseller for Blive so feel free to contact me if you want to do a demo of it or if you are interested in signing up.

Thanks,
David