Web Conferencing Blog

Normally Blackboard Collaborate wouldn’t have made it into our ranking. The vendor fails to deliver one element we see as crucial: making pricing information openly and easily accessible. Even searching the Blackboard website for quite some time left us none the wiser in that regard. Now there are two reasons we decided to test and rank Blackboard Collaborate after all:

1. We were curious to see how the successor of Ellumiate vRoom would do, a tool previously ranked 18 in our comparison of online meeting tools.
2. The renowned IT-research organization Gartner Inc. lists Blackboard as one of only 12 other vendors among the illustrious gang of Adobe, Microsoft, IBM and AT&T. So the tool must be good, right?

Wrong! After our extensive tests we were surprised to see a phenomenon that usually occurs the other way around. Web conferencing tools tend to get better with every version upgrade and usually climb up a bit in our overview – if only temporarily. Blackboard Collaborate disproved this trend and crashed all the way to 33. The only tool ranked lower is Microsoft NetMeeting, which we really only keep in our ranking for comparison and for which development and upgrading has stopped years back.

So did the programmers do a bad job after Blackboard acquired Elluminate and tried to integrate the vRoom-platform with the Wimba-technology? Well no, we wouldn’t go that far. For basic ‘learning management’ scenarios in which there are clearly defined roles for the participants Blackboard Collaborate works just fine. You can see that the platform has developed from the very specialized field of Learning Management Systems (LMS). If you are looking for a tool that allows you to be flexible in your diverse collaboration scenarios, Blackboard’s tool fails to deliver in areas that are crucial. Just to give you some examples:

• There is no invitation functionality integrated into Outlook.
• Switching control of keyboard and mouse was not possible in our tests – even though this feature is mentioned on the vendor’s website.
• When setting up a meeting the tool does not create a meeting specific ID which means that participants from former meetings can join any time.

Blackboard Collaborate disproves the phrase of “the name says it all”. The product name “Collaborate” promises a set of functionality and a user experience the tool fails to deliver. Blackboard should consider sticking to its strengths and concentrate on the LMS-market in which we would say it  has a good standing, and rightfully so. And the IT-researchers from Gartner should perhaps reconsider their selection of vendors for their “Magic Quadrant for Web Conferencing” since for Blackboard it seems quite arbitrary.

Cisco, RHUB and Microsoft – the web conferencing vendors ranked numbers three through five – will have to each step down a rank. BeamYourScreen, formerly ranked number seven, is now available for download in version 4 and brings many enhancements. Just as with the release of version 3 last year, when the tool climbed from rank 18 to 6, the developers once again have done a great job in actually improving the software.

Version 4 of BeamYourScreen comes in an all new layout which is nice and lean and makes for intuitive usage. Users can also adapt the range of functionalities for every single meeting. What we weren’t too exited about is the minimum 12 month contract duration. There are other small disadvantages, too but overall the web conferencing solution has been greatly improved and thus only stops short of knocking Citrix GoToMeeting and Adobe Connect 8 from numbers one and two.

If you decide to try out the new version of BeamYourScreen let us know what you think of it and post your experiences.

The math is easy: With the decrease in air traffic, the traffic on the web conferencing vendors’ servers increases. We checked back with the providers of online collaboration software and got numbers from Adobe, BeamYourScreen, Citrix, Digitalmeeting, and Spreed. These vendors recorded an average increase of 58 percent in sessions held last Friday, in comparison to regular workdays.

Some providers are currently offering special rates due to the chaos. So you might want to check those out when searching for a way to avoid getting stuck at the airport on the way to a meeting…

With Acrobat Connect Pro, Adobe offers a web conferencing solution that does not need to fear comparison with big players such as GoToMeeting or WebEx Meeting Center. The overall handling of this software is easy and intuitive. The drawback is that essential features, e.g. transferal of mouse or keyboard control during meetings, are not included. Without these features Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro only ranks number 7.

If you want to check out Adobe’s online collaboration tools you can start out with the free Adobe Connect Now.