Web conferencing woes

I’m evaluating several web conferencing packages for my organization. In my mind I imagine that there must be one that combines video conferencing, VOIP, traditional teleconferencing, app sharing and recording. And that doesn’t cost $10,000 a year to deploy.

I’m quite fond of Elluminate, which is a web conferencing service that comes from the academic world, originally designed for distributed e-learning, webinars and other nerdy education purposes. It’s OS independent, running as a java app. It’s got very nice moderation capabilities, like letting people “raise their hand,” “giving the mic” over to a participant, and assigning a sub-set of your participants to work together in a “breakout room.”

One other really nice feature is that it’s the only web conferencing provider out there that made the effort to be compatible with various screen readers for blind people and other people with disabilities.

That said, the academic edition is several thousands of dollars to deploy, and their “lite” version is too underpowered for my purposes.

WebDialogs is an interesting SME-oriented web conferencing service. I did a demo with one of their sales people today and it’s pretty slick. My main beef is that it doesn’t support video, nor does it offer VOIP, which kind of screws our international participants. Their voice component is handled by a traditional teleconference module.

WebDialogs has just released a free plug-in for Skype called “Unyte” that offers app sharing for up to five people. If Unyte was integrated into their basic conferencing package I’d be super-happy.

Anyone else have a webconferencing service that you are happy with that you’d like to share with me?