Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2005 vs. Citrix GoToMeeting, Aug 5

Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2005 and Citrix GoToMeeting are two services that address the breadth of Pillar 3 in our 7 Pillars of IT-Enabled Team Productivity framework. This research viewpoint reports on an independent comparison of the two services, and recommends a way forward for organizations trying to decide between the two.

Microsoft Live Meeting 2005
Live Meeting 2005 is the latest edition of Microsoft's Web conferencing offering. Microsoft entered the Web conferencing market with its acquisition of PlaceWare in January 2003, and later that year released Live Meeting 2003. The 2005 release is offered in two editions, an "Online Edition" and a "Professional Edition".

The Online Edition offers these capabilities:

• PowerPoint presentations, based on decks that are stored on the Live Meeting system or presented live from your desktop. In testing Live Meeting between two Windows PCs, I found the screen redraw was incredibly quick, definitely less than 1 second. The presenter has tools for marking up the presentation as they are going through it (so as to draw attention to certain aspects), and the ability to host polls and surveys on the fly (see below).


• One-way application sharing, to display applications, documents, or software to a group of people that are watching. The Online Edition does not permit the meeting moderator to pass control of the application or document to someone else.


• Polls, question and answer sessions, and chat. With respect to polls and surveys, a presenter can at any time during a PowerPoint presentation add in a poll with up to 6 result options. Results are tallied and displayed in real-time for the presenter, and they can choose whether or not to display the results to attendees.


• Meeting invitations that are distributed by email.


• Usage reports.


• Calendar integration, for showing upcoming meetings in your Outlook calendar.

The Professional Edition adds recording, custom branding, PDF downloads of the complete session, and two-way application and desktop sharing. In two-way application sharing, if I type a line into your Microsoft Word document, those changes are attributed to you. If you are doing a lot of this type of work, then an application like InstaColl would be a better choice, but you can get around the lack of correct author attribution in Live Meeting and GoToMeeting by merely prefixing your name on your contributions.

There are a couple of things I found strange with Live Meeting:

• Even though the user installs a 5MB client, they can't use it to start a meeting. They have to visit the Live Meeting Web site to do so. There is a Power Pack available, however, that adds the ability to "Meet Now", although I was unable to get that working against the trial edition of Live Meeting I used.


• When sending email invites to people from the Live Meeting client, there is no integration through to the Outlook Address Book. I can't understand why it is not an option.

The Online Edition of Live Meeting apparently costs US$375 per month for engaging with up to 5 people at once. At least, that's the figure that competitors are quoting. However, you can easily get the Personal Edition that costs only US$199 per year, or $16.58 per month. Note that the Personal Edition is licensed on a per named user basis, and enables you to host an unlimited number of meetings for an unlimited duration of time with up to 5 people. It *does not* include two-way application sharing capabilities.

Citrix GoToMeeting
Citrix GoToMeeting offers the ability to give presentations, demonstrations, and run online training. The GoToMeeting client is packed into a relatively tiny 1.7MB download, which I find quite incredible given all that it does. Key capabilities of GoToMeeting are:

• Meetings can be scheduled in advance, or started on-the-fly. The user right clicks the GoToMeeting system tray icon, and selects either "Schedule a Meeting" or "Meet Now".


• Two-way application sharing and the ability to change presenters on-the-fly is baked into the product. It worked flawlessly on the numerous trials that I put it through, both within my network, and with a colleague in other city. Changing presenter involves three clicks ... "Change Presenter" ... "Choose Who" ... "Are you sure?", and it's done. The organizer of the meeting can take back control at any time.


• PowerPoint presentations are displayed right from the desktop; there is not an option of uploading the deck to a GoToMeeting server. In tests across two computers, I found a screen redraw time of about 4 seconds, or 4 times longer than what I experienced under the same conditions with Live Meeting 2005. That's a significant difference.


• GoToMeeting is for Windows only (95, 98, 2000, Me, NT 4.0, XP or Server 2003). It requires a Java-enabled Web browser, such as IE 5.0 or later, Netscape 6.0 or later, or Mozilla Firefox 1.0 or later.


• When an attendee joins the conference, they must install the GoToMeeting client. Citrix says attendees "do not need to pre-install any software prior to joining the meeting", but I think that's cutting the truth fairly fine by using carefully selected words. Every attendee must download and install the GoToMeeting client, although it can happen on-the-fly as they join the meeting.

Citrix also has a per named user licensing policy, with a monthly cost of US$49 or US$39 if paid year-in-advance (US$468). For this, the named user can run an unlimited number of meetings of an unlimited duration, and there are no attendance fees for the up to 10 attendees. The Corporate edition of GoToMeeting is for up to 5 named organizers within an organization, and permits up to 25 attendees at each meeting. GoToMeeting also includes a no-charge voice conferencing service, meaning that a standard US non-toll free number is bundled along with the service. Attendees dial in and pay their standard toll rates, and the meeting organizer is not charged per minute fees.

Which To Choose
Under almost every circumstance, I recommend the adoption of Microsoft Live Meeting. Choose Live Meeting if any of the following apply:

1. You present to people that don't use Windows computers. Live Meeting supports a variety of Windows editions via the 5MB Live Meeting client, and adds support for non-Windows PCs via a Java client. I was seamlessly able to join a Live Meeting session via Safari on my Mac OS X desktop, although I noted that slide builds in PowerPoint were not supported, and Web links were not clickable. GoToMeeting is strictly Windows only.


2. You regularly present the same material to a raft of different people. In terms of showing PowerPoint decks, Live Meeting works best when the deck is uploaded to the Live Meeting service. You can use application sharing to display a PowerPoint show without converting it before display, but the rendering of the slides is more sluggish. Live Meeting enables the meeting owner to upload and store one or more PowerPoint files for regular display at multiple meetings. GoToMeeting doesn't support this; everything is done live.


3. You don't expect to pass control over your desktop or applications to others. If your planned use of a Pillar 3 product is for pushing visual information to a group of attendees, then Live Meeting is a fine choice. It is easy to be "master of the ship" and display your desktop and applications to others. If you expect to hand control over to others during the session then you should consider GoToMeeting.

The circumstance under which I recommend adopting Citrix GoToMeeting is where you are (a) working with a pre-defined group of people that all have Windows PCs, (b) regularly meet by Web conference where each person takes a turn to present what they are doing, and (c) the items presented are not static. In my experiments, I found application sharing, desktop sharing, and the switching of presenters to be much easier in GoToMeeting than in Live Meeting 2005. If your situation aligns with the three requirements above, then GoToMeeting is definitely a good choice. Secondly, if you are currently using an audio conferencing service where you are charged per minute per attendee as well as overage fees for using more than your selected number of monthly conferencing minutes, then GoToMeeting is excellent value even if you don't use the screen sharing capabilities.

Your Thoughts
What do you think? Have you used Live Meeting 2005 or Citrix GoToMeeting for Web conferencing, application sharing, and other Pillar 3 activities? What was your experience? Please leave a comment below, or email me for an off-the-record discussion.

Comments

[Peter de Haas]

Good stuff Michael :-)

What I would add is that LiveMeeting, through the add-ins is very well integrated with Micrsosoft Office Applications and also in the integrated communications scenario's, such as switching from an IM conversation in Office Communicator to a LiveMeeting session.

[Cliff Atkinson]

thanks for posting this, michael - it's really helpful, especially the link to the LiveMeeting personal edition.

some questions for you:
- did you also take a look at WebEx and Macromedia Breeze?
- did you look into the audio conferencing component in more detail? that seems to be a major additional cost on top of the services.

thanks!

[Michael Sampson]

Cliff,
I haven't reviewed WebEx and Breeze, but they're on my list. Yes, I agree that the inclusion of the audio conferencing component makes a significant difference to the TCO equation.

Thanks, M.

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