GoToMeeting

Commentaires: I love GoToMeeting (GTM)! I teach online and hold live chats sometimes 3 nights a week. I have to sometimes use another program, and at times when it doesn’t work I have quickly jusmped on GTM and it ‘saves the day” every time! I love the new TRANSCRIPTION feature too! And so do my students. Granted it isn’t perfect, but what speech-to-text feature is? I make sure to use GTM and introduce it to my students at least once per course. The following week I will switch back to the other program, and then I let my students vote on which program they’d prefer to use the following week – GTM wins every time! I have used other online VOI chat tools, but they seem to keep changing?! They "think" they're making improvements, but take away such a valuable feature as being able to share the moderator's entire screen?! Why?! Either that or their newer version cannot “handle” sharing the entire screen and errors out showing the same screen over and over again in a trail of overlapping screens that run off into infinity. GTM is just easier to use! Inviting attendees is even easy – just set up a future meeting and the email invitation is created for you! Easy peasy! I just took a another look at it again and played around with resizing and moving the feature windows and I even found something else about it that I didn't know before...so now I love it even more!

Avantages: Being able to quickly and easily show my online students what I am doing, by sharing my entire screen/desktop, on my computer is so important! SHARING MY ENTIRE SCREEN regardless of which program I am using, or switching to, and to also have them see the pop-up or embedded windows (like scroll over Alt tags or edit menus & windows) is a must! Another program (that I will not name) recently changed that specific feature so if the moderator shares the entire screen an infinite trail of windows appears and no one can see a thing. I'll choose go to meeting every time if I have the choice between the two! Don't get me wrong - GTM does allow you to also share only one specific application/program at a time IF that is what you would prefer to do. I just need/prefer to share my entire screen.

Inconvénients: Honestly, the only thing I can think of is I wish GTM would allow the attendees to "raise their hands" to let me know they have questions, or that I have missed a text/typed question. Either that or just give them an icon that can be clicked on that rings a bells in my ear so that I know to pause and/or ask the viewers to type their question again. I can understand that some moderators might not want to allow such interruptions during a presentation, or during a specific time, but giving the moderator an ON/OFF option for it would work for everyone! The little icon/button could be placed right next to the MIC controls on the Attendees pane.

Avantages: This is very well designed software for remote meetings with audio, video, and screen sharing. I also love the companion product GoToWebinar that I've used for many webinars over the last several years. GoToMeeting has gained such good adoption that it has integrations everywhere with tools like Google Calendar, Chrome, Zapier, and others. We used GoToMeeting for years for internal meetings, sales calls--basically any meeting with remote participants. I've even used it to pull church members into my Sunday School class on weekends that are homebound because of illness. I like how you can create a persistent link that you can go to every time rather than having to set up a new link for every meeting. Just be careful if you're having back to back meetings with the same link--otherwise, you get the next audience showing up at the tail end of the current meeting. I solved that by creating two persistent links and alternating them when I have back to back meetings. Price is right. When purchasing multiple licenses you can get the price down. It's also very stable in almost every environment including mobile meetings so you can participate in meetings on the go. It requires a simple install that I've never had anyone have a problem with.

Inconvénients: It takes more bandwidth than competitors like Zoom.us for similar functionality. Chat is limited to chatting within the meeting rather than creating chat rooms inside your company for teams to collaborate on then hop on a remote meeting. It's meant to be used every time you want to meet rather than an ongoing collaboration tool all of the time. I think they could learn something from Zoom about this.