Zoho Meeting, free web conferencing application

Zoho Meeting is one among the free offerings from Zoho. Zoho is one among the leaders of Office 2.0. Zoho Meeting allows you to create a web conference online for free. Zoho also feature cross browser support.

Zoho MeetingZoho introduced public beta of Zoho Meeting a month back. Honestly, I had a chance to play with it only a week before. Zoho turns everyones attention by adding up new offerings to its Office 2.0 suite. Zoho meeting can be used in conjunction with other Zoho Office application like Zoho Show, Zoho Notepad etc.,

Zoho Meeting is easy to use application as well. All you have to do is create a meeting and provide the email id’s of participant. Alternatively, participant can join using meeting key also. After creating the meeting the presenter has to start the meeting. This might require an installation of an agent which is light weight. The participant can join the conference with either ActiveX, Java or Flash support. The later one would be slower.

The Zoho meeting has an option for Presenter to increase the quality of the color; this might reduce the speed. When I did the test with two laptops within a LAN network, I did notice a latency but it was negligible. It also allows the participant to interact with a chat interface, which is powered by Zoho Chat.

Features,

  • It seamlessly works across any browser provided it either has Flash, ActiveX or Java support.
  • Embedded the meeting anywhere in blogs, web page etc.,
  • Remote control the presenters desktop.
  • Free / Easy to use.

Zoho Meeting ScreenShot

Zoho Meeting Viewer

Enhancements / Improvements

  • Cross platform, no support for Mac and Linux currently. Well everyone should be aware of this. But yes only this limitation applies to the meeting presenter; participant can access meeting from any platform. And I believe Zoho crew would be working on this already.
  • Enable audio conference support for live meetings. This might not be a high point since most of the meetings get hosted through telephone in parallel with web conferencing. But enabling audio conference would gain the attention of small and medium scale companies.
  • The chat window needs serious reworking to catch up with other offerings. The chat window interface annoys a bit. It doesn’t allow few basic chat function like saving the chat history, copying the chat message, etc., Few people might prefer having this feature when they believe the chat happened there was important to them.
  • Better Event / Failure logging mechanism. When I was test driving, Zoho Meeting happened to error out and crash due to some reason. Zoho didn’t record the broken conference and it was reporting the conference was still in progress.
  • It would be great to have an option to switch presenter in the meeting. This need occurs if there are two or three presenters in an online meeting.

These are the few minor points, which came into my notice when I was test-driving Zoho Meeting. Overall Zoho always rocks and I’m one of their fan. Previously I had some good experience with Site24x7 their site monitoring service.

Bottom line, Zoho Meeting can’t be a complete replacement for WebEx or other market leading products but it is a very good alternative for Small Office and Freelancers.

21 thoughts on “Zoho Meeting, free web conferencing application”

  1. Hey, this is pretty cool! I use GoToMyPC at work, but often longed for something I could use at home…for free. I’ll be sure to bookmark this one.

    Stumbled! 😉

  2. Hi Benedict,

    Many thanks for the great write-up.

    I want to add some points :
    1.) Audio : We are working on Skype integration (should be up in a week or so). Custom audio conferencing will come up in a few months !
    2.) Presenter support for Mac : You got it right. We are on it, though I can’t commit a time-frame for it :-
    3.) Chat transcripts are ‘automatically’ saved in Zoho Chat server. You can login to http://chat.zoho.com and see your transcript for the Meeting. We will fix the copy paste bug – sorry about that.
    4.) Event logging : Currently, we do catch failures in the Server, but don’t refresh the client page automatically. I would like to hear from you, on how you want this to be done. Are you expecting a notification of some sort in the client , or will auto-refresh do?
    5.) Option to switch Presenter : Coming soon 🙂

    Please correct me if I have misunderstood something.

    Have a nice day,
    Cheers
    SRK

  3. SRK – Thanks for stopping by.

    1. Skype integration is Cool but would really anticipate in built conferencing.

    2. Hope you guys will reach there soon. you have been there right from first day with iZoho apps for iPhone!. So I would really believe that would not take much time.

    3. I didn’t have any clue about transcript saved over there. But is there option to turn on / off as well.

    4. I’m not sure. If i got it wrong. In my case the meeting was active till next day i logged in back to Zoho Meeting. that’s why i assumed events are not logged at all. In case of failures notification would be great!

    5. you’re on track before anyone notes it down 🙂

    Great work guys!

  4. Thanks for the kind words.

    We will provide an option to turn on/off saving of chat transcripts, and also give a link to transcript from the Meeting page. That should make it better I guess..
    We don’t close/time-out the Meeting, unless the user closes the Presenter Agent/toolbar, or you could do this from the Client. That could be the ambiguity. We will try to handle this better..
    Audio-conferencing/Mac support : We will try to complete it as soon as we can..

    Thanks once again,

    Cheers
    SRK

  5. SRK – Thanks for the update!

    Idea of giving a link there would be great from the usability perspective.

    we would wait for the final release to see everything corrected / enhanced.

    BTW, Thank you for taking in the feedback.

  6. Zoho Meeting sounds great, but I’ve already got an assistant to plan all my meetings for me so that I don’t plan them myself! (How great is that? A real live planner! :D)

  7. I hate to LOL people, but I have to LOL you at this one! I have a live planner; a person to plan all my meetings for me. How lucky is that? 😀

  8. The downside of using the free beta version is that the presentation may not be as smooth as a tested solution’s because the software designers are still trying to work out all of its bugs to test for reliability and level of engagement.

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