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DimDim - YumYum Sunday, October 07, 2007

I have to take back my mocking words about DimDim, the Open Source web conferencing company. Having just received my invite to the beta, I was blown away with the breadth of facilities tucked inside this stylish yet FREE web conference service.

It's felt like I'd encountered the next evolutionary cycle of web conference tools - the offspring of vyew and zoho meeting. It's got some great features including

desktop sharing
application sharing, with specific shortcuts for Word, Excel, PDF, Browser, Powerpoint
whiteboard
ability to upload and show presentations
embedded live video and audio so you can talk to others in the meeting
public and private chat (although I confess I don't know how the presenter can have a private chat when their screen is in full view of everyone in the meeting)

As a Presenter only a browser plugin is needed while Attendees do not need to install anything, as they can watch via flash, which puts Yugma at a disadvantage as it requires an install. Similarly, Yuuguu is not as functionally rich at this time. Whilst vyew does offer most of the above features with the notable exception of video/audio, I always found the desktop sharing to be flaky.

It certainly looks good enough to give DimDim a try as my primary web conference tool, with zoho as a back-up.

Labels: dimdim, web conference