Zoho Unveils New Web Conferencing App: Zoho Meeting
As I mentioned in the Morning Reboot, Zoho has launched a new web conferencing feature dubbed Zoho Meeting. For now Zoho Meeting is a private beta available to select users — to apply for the beta trial login to Zoho and request access. The final release of Zoho Meeting is slated for April.
As with other web conferencing applications, like WebEx, Zoho Meeting allows for schedule meetings, shared desktop, integrated chat through Zoho Chat and more. Meeting attendees can request remote control of the host’s desktop and with Zoho Chat’s forthcoming VOIP capabilities Zoho meeting looks to be a nice all-in-one web conferencing app.
For the initial beta phase meetings must be initialized by a Windows machine (via an ActiveX controller), though meeting participants can be on any platform that supports Java or Flash.
While the meeting initiator needs download the ActiveX controller, one of the really nice things about Zoho Meeting is that attendees do not need to install anything to join a meeting. When you receive an invite to a meeting you’re given a choice between downloading the ActiveX component (Windows) or simply using the Java or Flash options which leverage the software already installed on your machine.
The Flash element of Zoho Meeting is where things get interesting and move a bit beyond what most of Zoho’s competitors offer. Meetings can be recorded and saved as slides in Zoho Show and, even better, if you choose to record your desktop presentation, the file is then available as a download. That also means that meetings can be embedded and displayed just about anywhere.
And the integration with Zoho Show works both ways. When creating a new presentation in Show, if you add a meeting slide (which embeds the Meeting Flash object) a meeting is automatically created for you. The Meeting-Show integration should be a boon for those wanting to remotely demo things for a large crowd of observers.
Zoho claims that by the time Meeting is released to the public in April there will be integration with even more Zoho apps, though thus far they haven’t given any details.
Some of the highlights of Zoho Meeting can be seen in the demo video embedded below.
