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We need someone like Ziff Davis labs to do a performance study of web conferencing solutions

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Right now you'll hear comments from people like "WebEx ScreenShare is quicker than Sametime", "NetMeeting is better than WebEx", "Live Meeting ScreenShare is slower than WebEx" but is there anything more to these comments than general impressions and anecdotal evidence? What we need is someone like Ziff Davis labs to do an evaluation and timing of the different solutions. Live Meeting would go up against WebEx and IBM's hosted Sametime. Sametime would go up against other internally deployable conferencing systems that offer screensharing.

What would it measure? Things like the redraw time for a complete PowerPoint slide to come down from one the hosting machine to the last client in the meeting, based upon things like different screen resolutions and bit depth; performance on networks with slower speeds and latency; audio performance, a tricky one to test without involving some human bias.

It's interesting, in years past the question from people always used to be "How long does it take to recalc" or "how many users can I get on this server", these questions seem to have gone away now, so how about we start a new question for conferencing solution vendors "How long does it take to screenshare a 1280x1024 32bit powerpoint slide to an end user in your software?"

Comments

Gravatar Image1 - This would be really useful Carl. I hear comments along these lines in my environment quite frequently. We host Sametime, and I would love to get a definative answer in this area. If not just to answer our users, but to keep IBM on their toes to!

Gravatar Image2 - I had an open case with Lotus support on why Sametime takes so long to redraw a screen. They opened SPR #JWER5UAR2H. "Sametime screen sharing takes 2-3 seconds versus Webex which is instantaneous." I found out in February of this year that the SPR was closed with no plans to address it.

From the technician "From what I gather there hasn't been many customers complaints regarding this disparity between Sametime screen sharing and other competing products and that developments focus has instead been on overall function and stability."

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