Unyte+: low-cost entry product with nice Skype integration

Unyte+ currently has a high profile on the Skype “make-free-calls over-the-Internet” scene, which could be a wise strategy for a product that has an entry price that is just one third of its nearest competitor.

Unyte+ is certainly better integrated with Skype than other web conference programs. You login to Unyte+ using your Skype credentials, and you can invite your Skype contacts with extra ease.

But to be fair, you can use Skype for your voice conference calls regardless of what product you use for the web conference, and Unyte+ can be used with any voice conferencing product without any loss of functionality.

Unyte+ is installed using a downloaded executable file, which may restrict you from running your web conferences from the nearest coffee shop. The meeting host must use a Windows PC, while participants can use any system (Windows, Macintosh, Linux etx) with a Java-capable browser.

You start meetings ad hoc by creating an invitation e-mail (the application does this for you), adding any teleconference information, pasting the participant’s names into the address field and pressing Send.

Unyte+ does not have any scheduling features. A powerful option – that other vendors often reserve for their higher-end offerings – is the ability to generate a permanent conference URL that you can place on your website. 

Without display scaling you may see only 25%

Connecting to a Unyte+ conference is simple, you just click on the link in the invitation. Unyte+ does not dynamically scale or zoom the presentation window, and is thus sensitive to display resolution. If the presenter is using a 1440 pixel wide-screen disply, and a participant uses a screen width of 800 pixels, only about a fourth of the shared desktop area will be visible for the participant. A simple circumvention – and our recommendation for most situations anyway – is for presenters to reduce their display width to 1024 pixels or even 800 before they begin the presentation.

A minor related complication is that your participants are viewing your screen in a browser window. Even if you all use the same display resolution, the browser will “steal” quite a lot of pixels at the top and bottom of each attendee’s window even when the browser window is maximized. Since this makes the display to small for the image it is showing, a scroll bar is also added on the right side of the browser window. Many browsers provide a “View full screen” option, by convention activated with the F11 function key. Perhaps your presentation checklist should include describing these effects to the participants, and the techniques they will need to master to be able to follow you during the presentation.

The presenter can share the whole desktop or just selected applications. Not sharing the whole desktop requires particular consideration. If a non-shared window is placed on top of a shared window, Unyte+ will indicate the position of the non-shared window on all the participant’s screens with a very obvious outline (see below). While participants cannot see what’s in the hidden window, they will soon start to wonder what it is you’re doing that’s so secret. We suggest you close all sensitive applications before you start sharing your desktop, and that you concentrate on the meeting taking place instead of checking your inbox or a chat window during the presentation.

With other programs a way around this problem is to pause the sharing of your desktop while you do something important that you don’t want the meeting attendees to see. Unfortunately, Unyte+ does not have this ability. When you stop sharing the desktop you also terminate the conference.

But the main drawback with this product is its poor performance. Unyte+ is extremely slow. It is one of the slowest of all the products we’ve tested, even at the medium quality setting. There is a high quality setting that provides excellent display quality, but it is totally useless in our environment. You may be able to successfully use Unyte+ during a slide presentation, as long as you make sure you keep talking for 10-15 seconds after you’ve moved to a new slide before you actually start referring to it. In many other cases we cannot see how you could hide from your meeting guests that you are trying to save a few bucks by wasting a lot of their precious time. In short, forget using Unyte+ for meetings you get paid for.

A low-budget feature set

Unyte+ provides adequate annotation tools; a useful pointer and a simple drawing tool with which you can circle things of interest. You cannot hand over control of the keyboard and mouse to one single participant, but you can give them all this capability at the same time. Well, Unyte+ may be a low-budget solution, but this is simply too low-budget for us. Imagine how long it will take before participants understand that whenever they move their own mouse, they are also moving the shared one. Not so funny unless it’s really late on Friday afternoon and you’re among friends.

Speaking of low-budget, Unyte+ does not provide any interaction tools whatsoever (chat, raise hand etc), but of course you may be able to use Skype chat or any other instant messaging solution that all the participants are users of. Unyte+ cannot switch to a different host during the presentation, i.e. to share someone else’s desktop.

There is no functionality for recording the presentation (but according to the Unyte website, this functionality is currently being developed). You can always use a separate screen-to-video or screen-to-flash converter, at a cost of around $40.

As you may have read between the lines, Unyte+ has no built-in teleconferencing. If all meeting participants can use Skype, it offers free conference calls with up to ten participants over the Internet. It also allows a limited number of participants to be called from the host of the teleconference using the SkypeOut feature, but these calls are charged by the minute. In most cases it would be both simpler and cheaper to use a free voice conference provider instead, such as freeconferencecall.com, or use just one SkypeOut call from the conference to connect to all users of “real” telephones via a free voice conferencing service.

Unyte is the only product that we have tested that has a user support forum. This allows users to help each other in case there are problems, to get technical support directly from the developers, and to suggest new features. When will Citrix (GoToMeeting) or WebEx (MeetMeNow) have the same courage to show their customer satisfaction? We hope to see the day when no-one will buy a product unless it has an open support forum like this.

Unyte+ is licensed per meeting host. It is not possible for two or more presenters to share the same license.

Summary

Unyte+ is not really for us. It’s just a bit too slow and too simple for our taste. But it’s half the price of comparable products, so if you’re the only presenter you could save a lot with Unyte+ compared to GatherPlace or BeamYourScreen. Just make sure you can live with the slow performance before you buy.