Doug Green

I've been looking for a good conferencing, screen sharing tool. I need something that works on both Ubuntu and Windows. It doesn't need to share all my monitors (actually I kinda prefer that it doesn't and uses only one), but it needs to work with a multi-monitor setup. I'd like something that I can put on my website, and point people to. And I'd like something that can record the session. My conclusion is that the jury is still out, I'm still looking, but I'll update as I narrow down the best solutions.

I'm familiar with VNC, and all the variants; I even had the opportunity to customize VNC for a client five or so years ago. But AFAIK, VNC doesn't offer voice, chat or conferencing options. I've also used logmein.com and the old gotomypc.com (which now looks like a Citrix product). At CivicActions we have a glance.net account, but only one for the entire company. And as I want to use this for both Drupal work and the Trading work, I'm not going to use a company account for that!

Most recently I evaluated vyew.com for about a week. I like the chat interface. I like that it gives you a handy free conference call number, but I wish that it handled the voice over IP, as part of the application. The collaborative spaces seem cool, but I have yet to use them. My overall evaluation is that vyew.com is not good enough mainly because it uses java, and as such, is a java flaky:

• I have constant problems with java on Win 64. First you need to know How to: Java in Firefox 3 on 64-bit Windows 7 or Vista. But frequently (not sure when, if it's on reboot, or when windows updates itself), I lose my settings, and I have to do that copy all the time. When you're trying to setup a meeting, conference, screen share, is NOT the time to get java working.
• Vyew in java on Ubuntu occasionally slows the latptop down too a screeching halt; I had to stop one meeting last week because of this.

I looked at Yugma.com. This didn't pass my initial test, as it couldn't detect my monitors properly, and just didn't work. The Yugma online help (or maybe it was the program itself) admits that it just doesn't work for setups like mine.

Today I used teamviewer.com. It worked smoothly and without effort. But alas, it looks like it's a Windows only solution.

So, I'll update this blog with details, as I discover more...