Online Collaboration Tools – An Analysis

There are lots of softwares available in the market for online communication. In an organization perspective, the requirements will differ based on their internal and expertal needs. Nowadays most of the companies are doing online seminars, webcasts and podcasts which is one of the best ways for marketing and business development.

It’s very hard to get good number of registrants and turn them as attendees. While attending the conference if they feel any inconvenience, the chance of expecting a sale would be very less. Everything is online, so everything should be perfect.

I can list out some of the softwares available in the market for online collaboration:

GoToMeeting/Webinar

 http://www.gotomeeting.com/

Live Meeting

http://www.livemeeting.com

WebEx

http://www.webex.com/

 Adobe Connect

http://www.adobe.com/products/connect/

 IBM Lotus Sametime Unyte

http://www.webdialogs.com/

http://www-306.ibm.com/software/lotus/category/uc2/

 Cisco Unified Meeting Place

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/ps5664/ps5669/

 AT&T Connect (formerly Interwise)

http://www.interwise.com/

 HP Virtual Rooms

http://h10076.www1.hp.com/education/hpvr/

 Yugma

http://www.yugma.com/

 ReadyTalk

http://www.readytalk.com/

AccuConference

http://accuconference.commissionriver.com/?crid=11432

 Live meeting is also more popular as like GoToMeeting/Webinar and it has lot of additional features than GoToMeeting/Webinar. However, it’s too costly when comparing others.

Yugma is a startup company which provides free tool for small level of meeting. Yugma is also a good tool for internal meetings.

WebEx ovwer Microsoft and love the Adobe Connect platform. Adobe is offering some good pricing since they are newer to the game and trying to get market share away from the big 2 (Microsoft and WebEx). They also are based on flash technology which requires no downloads for participants and a consistent url which makes getting your attendees into the meeting so much easier.