I recently found the need to share my desktop with a few people and wanted a better option to LiveMeeting, GoToMeeting and Yugma.  I could review those as well, but will stick to one that I found recently that is still in beta but was a great alternative.

After stumbling upon join.me (created by LogMeIn) I was immediately impressed with how SIMPLE it was!  Download this packet and presto!  It assigns you a number that you can email or share and people can just go to that URL and they are on.  For those joining the presentation it’s such a clean experience as there’s absolutely nothing to install.

There are some icons on the top of the presenter’s page to chat, call, pause, as well as give controls to others.

Upon using for the first time with a few clients there were a few things that I found out as well as some ideas for the beta team to hopefully make note of:

  • Navigating around the screen while on conference was great, but typing was unbearably slow.  In my presentation I had to fill in some forms to show functionality and there was a serious lag.  If you’re just presenting slides or clicking around, you probably won’t notice, but it was so bad I had to pause the presentation and type and then come back.
  • I wish there was the ability to schedule a meeting.  Maybe there is a didn’t realize it, but from what I could tell, you basically started the program and received a number.  If you closed your computer and restarted the program you now had a new number.  What this meant for me was that I had to wait until everyone got on the phone and then give the number.  It would be better if I could claim a certain number and then release it when I’m done.
  • It would be great if I could identify the area of the desktop that I want to share.  I typically have a good number of files on my desktop or alerts that show themselves on the screen and don’t want those to show up in the viewing area of the screen.
  • I’m not sure how this program would work on a double screen as I didn’t try that but hope that it would only share one screen so you could take notes on another or run application, etc.

Overall, the experience was great and nobody really complained.  I especially liked it as it was FREE!  Hopefully that continues beyond the beta.

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With over a decade of experience, I have managed online marketing for a wide range of industries including biotech, high-tech, financial, higher education, non-profit, manufacturing, hardware providers, and startups. My specialty is helping business make the right turn with their online efforts focusing on lead generation and analytics.

1 Comment

  1. hie there please check once again they allow you to schedule a meeting 🙂

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