Long-distance torture testing of web conferencing software tells the truth

Before we started testing web conferencing systems, we discussed the testing environment. How are web meetings performed? What are the most important features of a web conferencing system?

Our tests are based on the following assumptions:

• Most many-to-many web meetings (where everybody contributes) have few participants. It is very difficult to coordinate a conference call with many participants. The more participants in a meeting, the less they each contribute to the meeting. At some magic point, the meeting essentially becomes a one-to-many meeting that more and more resembles a recording. In this kind of environment, it makes much less difference what kind of web seminar software you are using – people are just watching the screen and listening anyway.
• The participants in an online meeting cannot meet in a meeting room. There are many advantages in meeting “for real”. The main reason people use virtual meetings is that they have no other option.
• The technical infrastructure for the meeting is unreliable. It is not possible to predict what kind of computer and operating system each participant in the meeting will have. They will connect to the Internet using whatever means available to them, which could be a corporate local area network, a wi-fi hotspot at an airport, a home office or a local Internet café.
• Almost all web meetings include sound. There is rarely a meaning in just showing the contents of a computer’s screen, a conversation is required too.
• Most web meetings take a long time. Setting up a web meeting is definitely more demanding than just making a voice conference call. If there is a slide presentation or other documents involved, this will often make the meeting longer than it would have been otherwise.

With the above criteria in mind, we established a long-distance torture testing environment that looked like this:

• In our tests, there was just one presenter/host and one participant. This made the meeting very intense, which placed high demands on the meeting software.
• The testers were far apart, making a “real” meeting impossible. The meeting host was placed in southern Europe, on the island of Sicily in Italy. The meeting participant was situated in Sweden in northern Europe.
• Both the host and the participant were working from home, and connecting to the Internet via ADSL. Since these connections usually have slow uplinks, the presentation software in the host computer had to manage the bandwidth very efficiently to achieve acceptable screen sharing performance.
• We always established an audio conference as well. Not all web conferencing systems include teleconferencing services, but since these are freely available from third-party providers this is never a problem.
• Our meetings always lasted more than half an hour, often much longer. This required the web conferencing infrastructure to function without interruptions or delays for a long time.

Generally speaking, all the tested products fulfilled our requirements. There were many differences in how fast they were or how much we liked using them, but basically you can just pick any current product on the market and it will work.

Now if you want to find the best product for your needs, you may want to continue reading about our Editor's Choice.