Do you use the various “meeting” apps like LiveMeeting, NetMeeting, WebEx, Virtual Conference Rooms, etc to share you desktop to others during a meeting? Have you found this to be generally useful or generally painful? I am on the road this week and was sitting in a office today I have never sat in and when you do that, the conversations around you tend to stick out because they are all new.
In a span of a couple of hours I heard several different people on con calls trying to use desktop sharing meeting software (not sure which). In every case, they had troubles setting up the sharing to everyone which seems to align with every meeting I have ever had that used it… The average time of the three callers to get everyone up and running exceeded 15 minutes and that discounts the fact that one person couldn’t get everyone online but they instead sent the power point to one person who couldn’t get online via email and went ahead with the meeting anyway… After about 20-25 minute of trying to set up that meeting it sounded like it was over in 45… So 20-25 setup, 20 of meeting… Ugh.
I have yet to have seen a case, personally, where it was critical to have the shared desktop, it was often just nice because I could kick back with my feet up and watch the screen. I wonder how many hundreds of hours a day are blown by folks trying to set up these connections. If you have 20 people on a conference call and you spend 15 minutes trying to hook everyone up, that is five hours burned right there in one call…
I think it is like email and IM and the jury is out on whether it actually helps or hurts our productivity as workers.
joe
p.s. I just ran this post through the spell checker on livewriter… It wanted to change LiveMeeting to alienating… I guess that could be accurate, if you spend 20-30 minutes setting up connectivity for a 60 minute call, that could alienate some customers. 🙂
Sametime is the absolute worst of these apps! I have spent so much time trying to connect to a sametime “meeting”, that it just became easier to send screen shots over email! I suspect this is more to do with it’s reliance on Java and the multiple JREs that exist on peoples machines.
Also interesting to note on these apps…they don’t seem to like multiple monitors. I was on a WebEx meeting and needed to share out a Word Doc. I moved the word Doc from my main monitor to my secondary monitor so I could read a piece of email that came in. It was at this time I received an IM (yes Joe, IM’s are awesome for productivity for me..:P) saying that my email was being shared on the conference. I quickly moved the word document back to the primary monitor and and closed the email.
I do like LiveMeeting however, but it being a hosted only service may have it’s limitations for some.
I should note that in the above comment I was sharing the Word window that was displaying the document and not my desktop. I was quite perturbed that when the word doc “disapeared” to the secondary monitor, the email became visible.
I have had the same thing happen with Office Communicator, but it just disapeared when I moved the shared window to the secondary monitor, and displayed a gray box to the conference participants.
That is an interesting “feature”… Hopefully the email wasn’t too revealing. 😉
I equate (but is worse actually) IM with the “walk by” where anyone who knows where you are can walk by your cube/office and ask for something regardless of whatever it is you are currently doing. You ahve simply made it so everyone knows where you are. It is also a great way to track folks. I use IM, but it always says I am away or offline. I wish MSN for instance would allow me ot say, these people can see my real status, these other people see X.
Check out Breeze some time. We have it deployed, and it’s far less painless than any other similar product I’ve ever seen. It requires a browser that can run a flash plug-in, and that’s about it. It came of age as a Macromedia product, and is now Adobe (as they bought Macromedia). It also has the advantage for a large enough enterprise that there is an option to host it “in house” rather than as a hosted service — enough volume and even with the overhead of admins, it’s an incredible cost savings.
Yes, I know I sound like a sales pitch, but it’s been a success story for us.
i agree, it’s hard to concentrate on something that takes a lot of focus when you are getting IMs all over the place.
I like webex and livemeeting; I’m on one at least twice a week and would say that only 1 in 6 have had any technical issue.