Top 10: Online Meeting software for business

2018. Zoho Meeting adds moderator controls



Online meetings software Zoho Meeting is introducing Moderator Controls. Now presenter can lock meetings to minimize interruptions when a useful discussion is underway. Once locked, no one can join. Also you can give anyone a chance to share their screen and illustrate their point using the Switch presenter feature. Participants can share documents, presentations, spreadsheets, or any other application, via screen sharing. Mute individuals or all participants to cancel background noise that might be interfering with your session. If someone inadvertantly joins or is no longer connected to the topic of discussion, just remove them and move on.


2018. Google Meet gets voice commands support



Google is enhancing its videoconferencing system Google Meet with voice commands. This will allow users to say, “Hey Google, start the meeting.” And this is just a starting point. They promise to be adding additional commands over time. They will be adding this functionality later this year. Just last Fall, the company launched the Hangouts Meet hardware program, which provided a way for Meet customers to launch meetings using Google or other hardware such as the traditional Cisco or Polycom hardware found in many conference rooms. Google reports that customers have set up thousands of these Hangouts Meet-enabled meeting rooms. By providing some simple commands to set up the meeting, invite participants, join a meeting and so forth using your voice, it can greatly simplify the sometimes complicated activity of meeting administration, which even after all these years often seems unnecessarily complicated and frustrating for many people.

2016. Cisco acquired online meetings startup Worklife



Cisco has acquired startup Worklife that was founded in 2015 with the idea of improving online meetings, something that Cisco has been working on for years. It of course owns WebEx and has been trying to enhance that experience in recent years with Cisco Spark. Cisco intends to add the Worklife team to the Spark team and try to bring their meeting wisdom to bear on the project. The idea behind Worklife is to keep the meeting on track by providing an agenda ahead of time that keeps people focused — or at least that’s the stated goal. There is also on-screen clock showing exactly how much time is left in the meeting (before you can back to real work) and you can create a record of the meeting and distribute it to participants afterward.


2015. Fuze acquired online team collaboration platform LiveMinutes



Web Conferencing company Fuze has qauired LiveMinutes, the online team collaboration platform. In LiveMinutes co-workers could set up workspaces where they could share files, including Office documents, PDFs, PSDs and more, as well as make conference calls over the web or Skype. With this addition, Fuze is no longer focused only on online meetings, but is now also rolling out a new product called Fuze Spaces which allows colleagues to chat, share and comment on files, organize projects, and more via a web-based dashboard. Fuze also announced today it had closed on $20 million in new funding to continue to expand its business. The company positions itself as a more modern alternative to services like WebEx and GoToMeeting with its voice and HD video conferencing solution aimed at helping distributed teams connect, share content and share screens via the cloud.


2014. Citrix launched free version of GoToMeeting



GoToMeeting is one of the most popular services for video calls, web-conferencing and webinars. Even though it's not so cheap, companies are willing to pay for it because the quality of communication is really important for online meetings. And now Citrix is launching the free version of the service - GoToMeeting Free, which allows to conduct online meetings with up to three participants. The app is built on the basis of the Chrome browser and it doesn't require registration, download and installation of additional software or browser extensions. You just press the "Start Meeting" button and get the meeting link, which you can send to one or two co-workers. However, this service is purely for video chat. It doesn't provide any web-conferencing collaboration tools which GoToMeetings is famous for.


2009. DimDim makes webinars more affordable



DimDim - is a web-conferencing service, hated by all its competitors (Webex and Co) for the low prices (combined with sufficient quality of service). How can one compete with DimDim, providing 20-person online meeting solution for free? Moreover it s available as SaaS and Open-Source solution. And recently DimDim unveiled new webinar service, that supports large online meetings with up to 1000 concurrent users for $75 per month. It goes beyond comparison with WebEx Meeting Center, that asks $69 a month for a virtual meeting room with 25 seats (imagine the price for 1000 seats). ***