WebProNews

Conducting A Successful Webcast

That's probably one of the stranger headlines the Wall Street Journal has run. Dana Mattioli has an article in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal where she lists some of the ways people get in trouble on webcasts and webinars.

Getting a Feel for Web Conference Usage

Web conferencing technology/service vendors, this is for you. Nobody really knows the true size of the market and how widespread the use of our medium is. Asking the clients about their usage won't ever get us a large enough response rate to get valid totals. So let's do a little group estimation amongst ourselves. I have put together a short (but difficult!) online survey. I'm asking each of the web conferencing technology vendors to go through and give best guesses and estimates of usage averages and totals that they see with their clients.

Adobe Technical Support Woeful

I like Adobe Acrobat Connect. The Professional version has a lot of advantages for enterprise conferencing use. I even appear as a frequent guest speaker on Adobe's public educational webinar series. But fair is fair, and it is time for Adobe to face up to a glaring deficiency in its offering. Technical support for the product is woeful. Mind you, what is available is pretty good. The online documentation for how to accomplish common tasks is clear and well written. The problem comes when that documentation doesn't satisfy your needs as a user.

Increasing Webinar Attendance

I received an email (actually a comment to one of my posts on typical webinar attendance rates) asking for advice and suggestions on how to improve attendance rates for training webinars. This email came from a vendor who works with independent franchise operators who sell the OEM's portfolio. He said he wanted to train them, get their attention, and motivate them to sell his services.

Live Meeting 2007 - Web Access Problems

It turns out that while David Chao's article was correct about the size of the Microsoft Live Meeting client download, that is only part of the story.

Oracle and Web Conferencing

An article by Paul Krill in InfoWorld caught my eye. It covers a web conference given by Oracle the otther day in which company representatives made lots of references to enterprise collaboration under the term Enterprise 2.0 (following on from the current trend of overusing the phrase "Web 2.0").

Acrobat Connect: Stronger, Faster...Better

Adobe released a Service Pack last week that enhances its Acrobat Connect and Acrobat Connect Professional web conferencing software. Service packs are often reserved for applying critical bug fixes between formal product releases, and while Service Pack 3 includes some bug fixes, Adobe is touting the upgrade as a major functional improvement to Connect.

A Webinar at a Tradeshow?

What if you organized a trade show and sold booth space to vendors, advertised the event, got a few thousand people to register... And then nobody showed up? If you were using Unisfair Virtual Events, you'd be perfectly happy.

Using Numbers for Effective Presentations

My friend Darcy at Fair Isaac Corporation shared a fascinating tip with me for making more effective presentations. This is something I had never really thought about. He says that publishers have long been aware of the power of numbers in grabbing people's attention. Think about titles of popular books such as "1,000 Places To See Before You Die" and "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People." Television does it with their countdown shows and websites do it with lists: "AFI's 100 Greatest American Movies" or "VH1's 100 Greatest Kid Stars."

Vendor Thoughts On Cisco & Web Conferencing

When Cisco made its announcement about purchasing WebEx on March 15, competing web conferencing software vendor iLinc rushed out a press release the following day, talking about the news from their perspective. This got me wondering what other vendors might have to say about theshakeup in the market. I decided to contact several of them in different niches of the industry and see what they felt like sharing.