Starting an online meeting with BeamYourScreen is very simple. The feature set and performance is average, but the price is high.
BeamYourScreen requires a Windows PC to host an online meeting session. Participants just need a plain browser. BeamYourScreen even supports a HTML-only view of the conference, if it is impossible to establish a more advanced connection to the meeting.
Installing BeamYourScreen is simple; you download a small program file and install it. Since most Internet cafés don’t allow you to install your own application, you may not be able to host BeamYourScreen web conferences from just any coffee shop.
Inviting visitors is very basic, you click on a button to generate an e-mail with the following contents:
Please click on the link below to join my BeamYourScreen session
https://www.beamyourscreen.com/viewer/start.aspx?sp=&sid=[session id]
If you have arranged a simultaneous telephone conference, you must manually add instructions on how to connect to the teleconference to the invitation e-mail before you send it. BeamYourScreen provides a free US phone number that you may use. There are also pay-to-use numbers from twelve countries, but using these numbers can be very expensive because of the high per-minute/per-user charges.
When users click on the link in the e-mail, they are prompted to enter the session ID and the name they want to be known by in the conference. The client portion of BeamYourScreen is downloaded automatically, and connects to the designated session.
Sharing the screen
BeamYourScreen handles screen resolution much more flexibly than most other web conference products, by automatically scaling the display so that it completely fills the window. Regardless of the size of the BeamYourScreen window on the participant’s screen, it always shows the entire area of the host’s screen that is being shared.
If you as the presenter decide to share only selected windows, you may want to avoid bringing any non-shared windows in front of the shared windows. The outline of any non-shared windows is visible on the participant’s screens as an empty rectangle, hiding the window you are sharing.
With the default quality settings, BeamYourScreen delivers line-art image quality. Once your screen contains gradients or photos it is obvious that quality has been sacrificed for speed. Like most of it’s competitors, BeamYourScreen has a High Quality option that delivers photo-quality screen quality – if you’re willing to wait for it.
BeamYourScreen has an optional feature called Gradual Screen Build-up. Instead of waiting for the whole window to be rendered in detail before it is displayed, BeamYourScreen can build a low-quality version of the page very quickly and then increase the level of detail until the screen is complete. Our impression is that this makes the program slightly faster for small changes, e.g. moving the mouse over menus or opening small windows. When scrolling from one presentation slide to the next, however, there was no noticeable increase in speed. Like most web conferencing products, BeamYourScreen can take 5-10 seconds to render a shared window in default quality.
Annotation and interaction
The speaker can annotate the shared screen with basic drawing tools. Participants can click anywhere in the display to create a colored arrow with the participant’s name. This makes it much simpler to handle questions from the audience, since they are capable of showing what their question is about. Many web conferencing products come without any means for a participant to interrupt the presentation. The colored arrows provided by BeamYourScreen also serve as a very useful “raised hand” signal to the presenter.
If required, the presenter can allow a participant to control the keyboard and mouse, e.g. to handle a particular step during a demonstration or lecture. If the participant needs to show a situation that has occurred on the participant’s own computer, BeamYourScreen also allows the presenter to share the participant’s screen for all to see.
The session recording functions in BeamYourScreen are largely useless and appear to be a last-minute addition to the program. Only the host can record the presentation, the recording cannot include the sound from the teleconference, the recording is in a proprietary format that only can be played back using a separate Session Player, and so the recording session cannot be played back by other meeting participants. We recommend that you use a separate screen-to-video or screen-to-flash converter instead.
You have an account at the BeamYourScreen website that contains a conference history and information about your license.
With BeamYourScreen you get a “join meeting” form that you can add to your website. This makes it possible to link to your own site in the meeting invitation, and have the participants enter the conference directly from there.
BeamYourScreen is slightly more expensive than most of its direct competitors. For the price of two licenses, up to ten users can share one account, as long as only one online meeting is performed at a time.
Summary
In summary, we would consider recommending BeamYourScreen if you need to conduct meetings from a Windows PC, with some of the participants using Unix. In a feature comparison, BeamYourScreen’s main competitor is GatherPlace, which does all the same things at half the price.
Published on Mar 27, 2007