Saturday, September 01, 2007

Free Online Collaboration -- yugma.com

For sometime now, I have been looking for a free online collaboration tool with the following features.

Features:
  1. Online Desktop Sharing with a decent number of attendees (10 is ok)
  2. Minimal Download requirements (No downloads would be ideal, but I think such is not yet technically feasible.)
  3. Teleconferencing
  4. Free
  5. Fast enough to be usable
  6. Change Presenters
  7. Annotations
Scenarios:
When would such a tool be useful:
  1. Having a team meeting on a website project.
  2. Helping, tutoring a person who is not so computer savvy.
  3. Whenever you want to make sure you and your partner are no the 'same page'.
I found yugma while surfing around and I decided to give it a quick test drive. Signup was quick and easy, and did not ask to divulge my personal identification. An email, user name, and password was all that was needed. It does require a java applet download. I have used WebEx and Cisco's conferencing in the office, and it seems that some kind of client pc install is still necessary for this function, either a windows install or a java applet.

I signed up my self and my wife. I installed it in two pcs, a Windows XP laptop (connected via 54G wifi), and a Windows Vista desktop. I put the two PCs side by side and started an online conference with myself as presenter, and my wife as attendee. The desktop sharing feature, and the teleconferencing feature worked as expected. I noticed some delay of the presenter's screen on the attendee's when the page was heavy on graphics. Pages that were primarily text presented fine. In fact, I would see letters being typed on the browser url on the attendee's screen almost with very little delay. In the course of this test drive, I ended up trying the applet in both IE 7 and Firefox 2 with no issues.

For a product that executes on the minimum online collaboration experience, for the cost of a download, this is definitely a must try.

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