MeetASAP: functionally rich, unacceptably slow

The first thing you notice with MeetASAP is its exceptional richness of function. It automatically creates its own list of contacts by importing your Skype and Messenger address books, and then allows you to assign roles and relations to these contacts that no other product comes near.

MeetASAP also comes with a powerful voice-over-IP solution that is tailored for the somewhat special “one-to-many” web conferencing situation. By default, only the presenter can speak freely. Participants are muted unless they press their “Speak” button. This removes many of the drawbacks of other voice conferencing solutions, at least if there is a not more than a “normal” amount of user interaction.

With MeetASAP you also get a discount on an advanced teleconferencing solution. This will give you access to toll-free dial-in numbers around the world, at a cost of $0.05-$0.30 per participant per minute. We believe the three- to four-digit usage charges for such a solution soon will become absolutely prohibitive for most users in this price range. But of course you can always use one of the excellent free voice conferencing providers also with MeetASAP.

Screen sharing using Flash

The meeting host must be using Windows, but participants just need a web browser with a Flash plug-in – which incidentally also allows Macintosh and Linux clients. The desktop sharing applet is normally installed automatically when you start setting up your account. As far as we can tell, you could host MeetASAP meetings from just about any Windows PC in the world, e.g in an Internet café. In our case the installation process appeared to have problems with our network connection, which forced us to download an executable file and perform a more conventional installation (which worked flawlessly, but probably wouldn’t have been permitted with a public computer).

MeetASAP rarely lacks functionality we find important, but its invitation process has an obvious flaw: the invitation e-mail is sent directly to the participants. You have no chance of verifing, or modifying, it’s contents. Also, it is always written in English, which may cause problems in an international environment. For us, this flaw makes the invitation function useless. However, the program can generate meeting URLs that you can paste into e-mails or even put up on your web site.

When attendees enter the meeting using their web browser, the MeetASAP presentation controls occupy a considerable part of the browser window. If you add to this that MeetASAP doesn’t scale the presenter’s window to fit the participant’s browser window, you may find your attendees desperately scrolling up and down, left and right, to see your whole screen and what you’re doing on it. With MeetASAP, the presenter should never use a display resultion above 800x600 pixels. Also, at the beginning of the meeting it would be useful to say a few words about how users can avoid scrolling, e.g. by setting the browser window to full-screen mode, usually by pressing F11.

Unfortunately, MeetASAP display sharing performance is unacceptable even at the medium quality setting. We would never let our participants wait for this program’s painful rendering of a rather low-quality image. It’s really a pity that the developers seem to have spent all their efforts on add-on features instead of focusing on the core functionality. We suspect that MeetASAP is built with the Java programming language in order to work in as many technical environments as possible. However, as a consequence of its design, Java is a slow run-time environment that may not be the best choice for the high-speed data compression requirements in web conferencing.

MeetASAP allows you to share just a few of the applications on your PC. Not only is this normally a useless feature (just close the applications you don’t want visible during the conference!), it also introduces blue squares on the shared display whenever the presenter partly hides a shared window by placing a non-shared window on top of it.

You can pause sharing temporarily, e.g. if you need to set up your PC for a demonstration. Meeting participants can interact with you by raising their hand (virtually, of course) or using the chat window. You can hand over the mouse and keyboard to a participant or another presenter, or switch host by asking MeetASAP to share the desktop of another Windows PC. As usual, MeetASAP provides noticeably higher functionality than its competitors, and allows granular control of what meeting participants can do and not do during the meeting.

MeetASAP provides both drawing- and text-based annotation tools. Interacting with the presenter using MeetASAP’s loud Emotisounds is hilarious – you can whistle and beep and toot as much as you want… MeetASAP includes a separate third-party program for recording conferences – including the voice conference if the built-in “voice conferencing over Internet” solution is used, or with an adapter connecting the telephone line to one of the computer’s input jacks.

MeetASAP pricing follows the number of hosts and there is no possibility of sharing a license with a few colleagues.

Summary

We really like MeetASAP for its rich functionality and its ease-of-use. One day the choice of Flash as the screen sharing mechanism will work as well in practice as in theory. But for the moment it simply cannot compare with the super-fast native implementations of GoToMeeting or MeetMeNow. If you require support for Unix clients you may want to compare MeetASAP with GatherPlace which is cheaper but lacks some of the great functionality in MeetASAP.