eBLVD: Secure simplicity and smooth scheduling

With eBLVD (pronounced e-boulevard), you use the eBLVD website to manage conference scheduling and invitations to web meetings. A small add-in to Outlook provides a direct link to the “Online Meetings” area of the eBLVD website. If the eBLVD application is already running on your PC, you can also use its menu shortcuts to go directly to the eBLVD meeting planner. An online calendar and address book greatly simplify meeting planning. As you schedule web conferences you have the option of adding them directly to your calendar in Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes.

To start a web meeting you log in to your account and select “Meet Now” or “Schedule a meeting”. Once you’ve defined the particulars of a meeting, you can begin inviting participants. eBLVD can send e-mail invitations directly or create an invitation template that you can copy and paste into a messaging application, a web page or a text document.

Each meeting has its own unique ID number, which is assigned when the meeting is scheduled. A meeting link has the format

http://meetings.eblvd.com/[username]?id=[meeting ID]

If you want to link to a particular meeting you can place the meeting-specific link on your own website. With each eBLVD account you also get a "public" page on the eBLVD website where all your public scheduled meetings are listed automatically. We found it more convenient to create a "permanent" link on our own website to this “My Meetings” page – it does require each participant to click twice to get to the actual meeting they want to attend, but it’s a much simpler linking structure to maintain.

When participants get the invitation, they can add the meeting to their Outlook or Notes calendar directly from the Meeting Details page. When the meeting is about to start, participants set the name they wish to use during the meeting and press the “Attend Meeting” to connect to the host PC. 

Only Windows clients allowed here

eBLVD uses downloadable ActiveX components to share/view the presenter’s desktop during the conference. Since all the planning is done using the eBLVD website, we believe that an eBLVD web conference can be conducted from almost any Windows PC in the world – including public PC:s like those in an Internet café. We’d like to stress the “PC” part – eBLVD does not recognize Macintosh or Unix clients, which makes it unusable for us.

In our torture tests our eBLVD client was consistently unable to connect to the eBLVD host. According to the support information on the eBLVD website, the “unable to complete handshaking” error we were having normally occurs when eBLVD is unable to traverse routers or firewalls. We tested seven programs in the same session and none of the others had similar problems. Be sure to test eBLVD in your own networking environment before you buy it. As a side note, eBLVD support has not yet responded to our error report.

To participate in the audio portion of a web conference, attendees can call a standard US telephone number optionally assigned by the eBLVD meeting planner, at the normal rate for the telephone call from their location. If all attendees have access to headsets, the meeting can be conducted solely using the built-in “voice chat” functionality, which in essence is a rudimentary one-to-many VoIP application. Both teleconferencing options are included for free. eBLVD can also provide toll-free conference calls upon request.

Both the web conference and the audio conference can be recorded, but only by the participants and only if this option has been enabled for them by the host. The audio is recorded separately and must be manually edited onto the .avi file containing the web presentation using a standard video editing program. We find it rather awkward that the host must add a separate participant just to record the meeting, and recommend that you use a separate screen-to-video or screen-to-flash converter instead.

During the meeting, the presenter always shares the entire desktop – it is not possible to share only selected windows. From our experience, the ability to share just one or two windows is not as useful as it may seem at first. If you want to hide your e-mail inbox or messaging application from your meeting participants, you can just close the corresponding application – this is normally not something you should deal with during a web conference anyway.

eBLVD is one of the more expensive programs we have tested. On the other hand, it allows two or more presenters to share one account – only one online meeting at a time – at half the price of a full license.

Summary

In summary, we couldn’t test eBLVD thoroughly because of connection problems. It appears to be a feature-rich program at a slightly higher price than its main competitors. Since eBLVD only supports Windows clients, it compares head-on with MeetMeNow, which is one of the fastest programs according to our tests and also considerably cheaper than eBLVD.