WebEx MeetMeNow: so fast but so difficult to learn

Let’s start out by honestly admitting that MeetMeNow is more than we intuitively master. There’s something about its user interface that makes us feel uncomfortable. Could it be that it still doesn’t support the 23-year old Macintosh? No, it’s something even worse. This tool doesn’t really understand the conference process.

On the other hand, WebEx MeetMeNow is absolutely the fastest, meanest web conference software we have ever seen. The way it handles things like PowerPoint animations is soooo impressive. Nobody does it better.

It needs a Help button

Installing MeetMeNow from the website is very simple. You can start a meeting either from the desktop application or from the WebEx website. When you press the “Send Invite” button it nicely creates an e-mail for you with the meeting details it is aware of at that point.

So it may for example say “MEETING PASSWORD: No password”. To be honest, we still haven’t got a clue where to assign a password to an immediate meeting. It seems you can only assign a password to a meeting if you schedule it in advance.

There is an html-based help section on the web that’s only accessible from the desktop application menu. On the same website there is also a pdf file with exactly the same content, well hidden in the Support section of the website. Come on girls, place a Help button in the web application now – it needs one.

During our test, the invitation e-mail merrily stated “Time: 10:15 pm, Europe Daylight Time (GMT +02:00, Paris)”. Now Europe spans over several time zones, so there’s no such thing as “Europe Daylight Time”. In the desktop application, MeetMeNow even incorrectly refers to Paris time as “Western Europe Daylight Time”, but Western European time is really the same as Greenwich time, which is mainly used in the UK, Ireland, Iceland and Portugal. If you refer to time zones you must be exact, in particular when you’re scheduling meetings. Paris is on Central European Time in the winter and on Central European Summer Time in the summer.

The meeting invitation continues “Teleconference: No teleconference”. At this point we haven’t even been asked about whether to start a teleconference. If you start a meeting from the web, the only way you can start a teleconference is to press a small telephone symbol in the lower left-hand corner of the desktop application, just next to the “Chat” button. And you absolutely have to do this before you press the “Send Invite” button, at least if you want your participants to know what telephone number to meet you on. Once again, if you schedule your meeting in advance, you have all the meeting options clearly outlined for you.

When you click on the telephone symbol, MeetMeNow opens the teleconference and then gives you your own connection details in a separate message box. The information in this message box will not be available anywhere else, and cannot be used with copy/paste, so you have to write it all down before you press OK. You get a US phone number, a meeting number (the same number you got when you started the meeting), and an attendee ID (which always seems to be 1). If you press “Send Invite” now, MeetMeNow creates an e-mail that includes the call details for the participants. However, it does not assign an attendee ID to each participant.

Connecting to the meeting

If the participant makes the teleconference call upon receipt of the invitation e-mail, things will get really nasty. The teleconference program will request an attendee ID which the participant has never heard of. It will also suggest that the participant just press # if the attendee ID is unknown. So of course they do, and end up in the conference as uninvited guests with a machine-generated name, while their real username never arrives at the meeting.

The only way that this works is if the participant first clicks on the meeting URL, which points to the MeetMeNow website. MeetMeNow will then assign a meeting ID to the participant – which isn’t 2 for the second person as you might have guessed, but could be 7 or some other unexpected number. The participant enters the meeting number to be connected to the shared desktop, then makes the teleconference call and enters the assigned attendee number. Once the teleconference call has been established, the desktop application will display the name of the new meeting participant correctly.

Sorry for the lengthy explanation, but what we’re trying to say is that we really like the person that coded the extremely fast MeetMeNow rendering engine, but we have major problems with the person that created the strange and unnecessarily complex user interface. But to be fair, the advanced connection between the web conference and the teleconference allows you to do things most other products cannot do, like mute individual participants by pressing a button in the desktop application, or see when they hang up.

Sharing the screen

Compared to its competitors. MeetMeNow is one of the few applications that provides a very flexible handling of the shared window. Basically, MeetMeNow will scale the host’s window so that it always fits in the window the participant has assigned for it. However, one of our testers reported that the bottom part of the screen wasn’t fully visible in full-screen mode.

MeetMeNow always shares your entire desktop. Other web conferencing applications allow you to share only certain applications, which we regard as an unnecessary feature that mostly complicates things – at least for the presenter. If you want to do something on the side during the presentation you can instead just briefly pause desktop sharing.

With WebEx MeetMeNow, the display quality is nothing short of impeccable. In full-screen mode it is as if you were watching the host’s screen directly, and it handles PowerPoint animations flawlessly. If you scroll through a group of presentation slides, the participants will just be a second or two behind you. This is three to five times faster than most of the competitors.

The drawback? All participants have to run Windows, and we just cannot accept that limitation. Just what do you say to the manager of the design group when he wishes to join the conference from his Macintosh? “I didn’t think of that” is not a good answer.

Interaction and annotation features

The presenter can temporarily freeze the screen with the annotation feature, which has both drawing or text tools.

Participants can interact with the presenter in several ways during the conference. There is a "raise hand” feature that would be more useful if it generated a beep or something. The raised hand symbol appears in the list of participants, of which only four lines are visible. So how do you see a raised hand with more than three participants and one host? We don’t know.

There is also a chat window that can be used for private chats or for communication with all participants. The presenter can pass control over the mouse and keyboard to any participant in the meeting, but as far as we can see they cannot use the annotation feature which makes it much more complicated for them to illustrate what they want to say. The presenter can also change host, to share another participant’s screen instead. This is a feature that is very useful when a course is performed over the web. Unfortunately, MeetMeNow does not provide a discount when more than one presenter wishes to share one license.

The teleconference is always assigned a US phone number which usually shouldn’t be too much of a problem for international participants.

MeetMeNow does not let you record a web conference, neither with nor without sound. Separate screen-to-video and screen-to-flash converters are available at around $40.

Summary

In summary, MeetMeNow should be your #1 choice whenever you’re 100% sure that every attendee has a Windows PC. If you ignore the MeetMeNow web site and just use the desktop application to schedule meetings you’ll quickly learn its quirks. During your presentations you never have to think about waiting for your participants, because they will be with you all the way.