Web Conferencing Just Got Easier

Have you ever been to a meeting to find that perhaps it really wasn’t of value to you? Worse yet how many of us have travelled miles to a meeting which ended up being cancelled, or postponed because of the weather or other random act.

I took part in my first web-conference in 1990 in the offices of the pharmaceutical company GSK, known then as Glaxo. This was in a purpose designed facility costing hundreds of thousands of pounds where we participated in a trans-Atlantic conference call. But ever since that time I have been struck by what a wonderful tool web-conferencing is and I have been keen to use it at every opportunity to reduce my travel time, reduce costs, suffer less from cancellations and postponements and more recently to reduce my carbon hand prints.

Nowadays with excellent broadband speeds web conferencing is becoming easier and cheaper.

I have up until recently been a fan of WebEx, this service works well and is, relatively cheap. But in the spirit of Open Source I’ve been tracking a product called dimdim which promised similar functionality for even less. The initial releases of this product could not match the reliability I’d come to expect with WebEx.

Enter dimdim 4.5 and it is finally living up to expectations. Why is this important? Well as local authorities are moving towards flexible working and home working becomes essential in reducing costs and promoting better working, the ability to have meetings which are not face to face, reducing time and costs, becomes key. In many of the larger organisations growth has left them in multiple buildings geographically dispersed across a town or city. In such cases meetings with collegues can often become tiresome affairs, requiring you to find a meeting room in a location which is easy for all. Sometimes you find that a meeting room is not available either when you need it or at short notice.

Using a system such as dimdim is easy, quick to setup and requires no training, although I’d suggest that you have a practice before doing your first real live web meeting! You can kick off a meeting immediately or schedule it for later. Once you have your meeting setup, you should login ahead of time to load up any presentations or documents you want to share. If you load up a PowerPoint presentation or PDF document you can use them as slide shows, annotating and pointing as you go.

There is a shared whiteboard, or you can share your screen which is useful for showing people applications such as databases, emails or for conducting demos. There are many ways to interact with your participants, including the ability to use webcam video and audio, two-way if you like. There is the ability to chat with all attendees, or send private instant messages to individuals, even as you present.

As far as audio is concerned their dial in facility is US based, so I’d suggest that you use your own teleconference facility if you already have it, or use one of the teleconference facilities such as Conference Genie, PowWowNow, Conference Now or myriad of others.

One big benefit of dimdim is that viewers of a presentation do not have to download or install any applications, plug-ins, ActiveX controls, etc. That is sure to please participants specially those who don’t have the privileges to install bits on their machines.

So what are you waiting for, go ahead and share.

A New Behemoth in the ECM World?

Until this year ECM vendor Open Text was the gorilla in the ECM market place. It has swallowed up many rivals, whilst other competitors such as Documentum, FileNET and Stellent were acquired by yet larger fish - EMC, IBM and Oracle. This left Open Text as the leading independent player in the ECM marketplace, with a strong focus in this area.

However in the background almost without our notice search vendor Autonomy have been moving towards the ECM marketplace with its acquisitions of various "rivals" such as Verity, Zantaz, Meridio and most recently WCM vendor Interwoven. I say rivals although you would not have thought this as Autonomy has always said it has been in the enterprise search space or rather "Meaning Based Computing" a term which nobody else uses and very few truly understand. Its recent acquisitions belie this however and whether by accident or design Autonomy is now moving firmly into the ECM space.

A contrast between the two companies draws up some interesting similarities - both started as search engine companies, both have grown by acquisition, Open Text having acquired Basis, Capatris, IXOS, Hummingbird (and through them RedDot and Valid) amongst others. Both companies are now addicted to acquisitions (after all it's an easier way to grow) and both will suffer from technology indigestion.

Whilst acquiring another company in the same space with similar technology does offer some attractions it also brings some significant challenges and difficult choices about future investment. It brings a great deal of uncertainty to customers also. Even internally for those company's sales forces the messages become blurred. As of the Hummingbird acquisition Open Text had multiple product lines: 3 web content management systems, 2 document management systems and 3 records management systems. All of these have to be integrated or dropped and if this happens how will the customer base react and be handled? Autonomy is heading the same way.

Is this good for the market? Is it good for customers? You may have different views on consolidation - it reduces competition, but it makes choices easier (obviously there is less to chose from) and the larger companies are more stable and secure. However if I was an Interwoven customer now - I would be worried about my investment.

One can also see this as a further step towards commoditizing the ECM marketplace, in this new world the proprietary companies have to add more value and features to their products lines to compete with open source startups such as Alfresco and Nuxeo.

Other coverage of this subject:

• CMS Watch First Take
• Autonomy Buys Interwoven for $775M