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GoToWebinar.com: Better Than Webex, But Beware Phone Problems (Incompatible with Some VOIP Systems)
posted Thursday, 6 March 2008
I love GoToWebinar.com , a service I find much superior to the clunky, expensive, and error-prone Webex service. I did a Webex Webinar last week and was shocked to see that the background graphics of my PowerPoint slides had been marred by the service's conversion system, and was troubled that I had to abandon many builds as well. Why can't they just show what's on your screen instead of having to upload your slides to have their software convert it to their own format with unpredicatable results? Crazy.
GoToWebinar is much better and less expensive, but my third Webinar with them was a near disaster because of an incompatibility with GoToWebinar and Internet phone systems. You need to know about this if you have VOIP. Our company uses a VOIP phone system through One Communications (my first two Webinars with GoToWebinar.com were done elsewhere). The phone system works fine and offers high quality communication, but for some reason it doesn't work with GoToWebinar. Unfortunately, the incompatibility was not discovered during our successful practice session, and there was no clue that there was a problem as we set up for the seminar. At the moment we went live - or tried to - there was no indication that anything was wrong. The panelist could hear me, and could still hear me when I pushed *1 to go live. We thought we were live and began the Webinar. Fortunately, being somewhat paranoid, I found someone else in our office just a moment before the Webinar began and asked them to log in and make sure that they could see and here the presentation that 30 people were about to watch. When I pushed *1 and introduced our speaker, the president of a company, I got a frantic signal that there was no sound - just a voice saying that the Webinar will begin shortly.
I pushed *1 several more times, both in succession and at the same time. Nothing.
I grabbed my cell phone and quickly called GotoWebinar support and fortunately reached a person right away. But tech support wasn't aware of how this could be and thought I must have dialed the wrong number. No, I was certain that I had called the correct number and had been recognized as the organizer. Hmmm, well, let me put you on hold and check. After a minute of that - already past the start time for the Webinar - I gave up, hung up, and fortunately tried something that worked: I dialed the organizer number again with my cell phone, pressed *1, and started the conference call successfully. We were just a little late and I was frazzled (and forgot to record the Webinar, sadly), but at least we went live for one of the most valuable Webinar's I've ever seen .
Unfortunately, I missed part of the Webinar because, assuming that my cell phone would have to stay on to keep the conference live, I was worried about its battery running out during the course of the hour and went to another phone to call tech support again and find out what I could do. This time I had to wait for several minutes to reach someone and then it took a long time to explain the predicament and get an answer, which was simply to have another organizer line called in with no need to press *1 again, so I could hang up on the cell phone. While with tech support, I also learned that there is a known issue with some VOIP systems, where once the call is established, commands like *1 sometimes aren't recognized.
Hey, if it's a known problem, why isn't there a warning to users? Why isn't that tested in the practice session? And why did the first tech support person I call not recognize what the problem was and offer help?
I think there needs to be a test in practice sessions to verify phone compatibility and a warning about the problems of some VOIP systems, with workarounds ready for those that use such systems. I'm sure this is a recently recognized problem that only affects a few of us, but it will be a growing problem, I suspect, and should be addressed up front.
comments (3)
1. Mike left...
Monday, 7 April 2008 12:55 pm
GoToMeeting requires that you use their teleconferencing. They use a 3rd
party vendor, freeconferencecall.com, so they cannot really do any tech
support on it because they dont carry it or even pay for it.
2. Jeff Lindsay left...
Friday, 18 April 2008 7:40 am :: http://www.mormanity.org
You can use your own call-in number if you prefer. But I haven't seen any
problems with their call-in number other than the fact that some VOIP
phones have trouble sending the *1 command that initiates the broadcast, so
have a cell-phone ready if that's a risk.
3. Jim left...
Thursday, 3 July 2008 1:58 pm :: http://speechrep.com
One web conferencing software that kicks butt is www.saviidesk.com. It
does for so many reasons. You can use it on a mobile phone with windows CE
(soon iPhone) you have a choice for audio, phone or computer, it synch's
voice, desktop and video in real time, it costs less than Web ex, it is
SaaS, no licenses, 1,000 + users, 400kb download, can archive each session,
can get thru company firewall and much more.