Online conference (web video conference) or online web conference and Web Meeting software are a necessary tool in today’s world. These Net Meeting services are used worldwide to cut down the high cost of travel. Now using virtual meetings organizations can reduce the overall expenses in executing project , customer -vendor interaction etc.
Web conferencing is useful in conducting live meetings, training, or presentations via the Internet where each participant in the meeting sits at his or her own computer and is connected to other participants via the internet through Web Meeting channels.
There are many Web popular and widely used web conferencing software exists today. Most popular are are WebEx Communications from Cisco, Microsoft Office Live Meeting , Citrix GotoMeeting, IBM Lotus Sametime, IBM LotusLive etc. But majority of them are commercial subscription-based web conferencing services but provides trial versions or services.
Few commercial web conferencing software supports Encrypted communication, Security Access, Break-Out Sessions etc. Even though these features are not required for normal web conferencing , almost none of the Free and Open source supports those features.
These Web conferencing applications can be hosted in the internet or can be downloaded to your machine and start using it over internet.
Let us see some of the Free Web conferencing which offers net meeting facilities without any charge.
Free Web conferencing – Web Meeting- Net Meeting software
1. BuddyMeeting
BuddyMeeting uses open source software and all the services are free. BuddyMeeting offers Online Training, Desktop Sharing, Web Conference, Online Meetings. The max number of participants in a meeting is 25. BuddyMeeting use BigBlueButton (BBB) technology as the backbone system. The BuddyMeeting meeting runs using Flash technology. Does not need any application installed. You need to first sign-up as a Buddy, and then login to your account before creating meetings. BuddyMeeting now allows users to Sign-up or Login using their Google or Facebook login, instead of creating another user-id.
Try BuddyMeeting
2. BigBlueButton
BigBlueButton is an open source web conferencing system. BigBlueButton is mainly used for distance education.BBB supports sharing of slides (PDF and PPT), video, whiteboard, chat, voice (need speakers and a microphone to participate), and desktops. It’s built using over fifteen open source components. BigBlueButton runs on Mac, Unix, and PC computers. BigBlueButton uses red5 the open source implementation of Adobe’s Flash Media Server. One of the god feature of BigBlueButton is that multiple users can share their web-cam at the same time. There is no limit for this. On Linux machines BigBlueButton can be installed either from source code or from Ubuntu packages.
Try BigBlueButton
3. Openmeetings
OpenMeetings is a free browser-based software that allows you to set up instantly a conference in the Web. Using Openmeetings you can use your microphone for Audio communication or webcam for Video conferencing, share documents on a white board, share your screen or record meetings. The Openmeetings is available as hosted service or you download and install a package on your server with no limitations in usage or users. Openmeetings supports Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, Solaris, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Novell SUSE Linux.
Try Openmeetings
Check Demo-Portal
4. ShowDocument
ShowDocument provides integrated voice, video and text features. Provides features like Co-edit, collaborate and work on document type files (e.g. DOC, RTF, TXT) with colleagues, business partners, clients or anyone else connected to the Internet. Also you can upload (from your computer, server, web or other source), share, discuss and annotate on a wide range of documents, including Microsoft® Word, PowerPoint®, Adobe® PDF, text, image and video clip files
Try ShowDocument
5. TokBox – OpenTok
TokBox is another free web conferencing software.It is a web application that allows users to make multi-party video chat calls over the Internet. As with other web conferencing tools you can invite people to join their video chats via email, instant messaging and social media sites and allows you to start a multi-party video chat with up to 20 people.
Try TokBox
6. Dimdim
Salesforce.com recently acquired Dimdim. Dimdim provided free web conferencing service. Users could share desktops, show slides, collaborate, chat, talk and broadcast via webcam.Free meetings were made available for up to ten users.
Try DimDim
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try GoMeetNow http://www.gomeetnow.com
The best part of GoMeetNow is you could purchase licenses on a daily base. For example, if you have a large meeting today, you could scale your licenses to 100 people. When you finish, you could switch back to 2 people.
@Janet,
Thanks for sharing the information and for visiting globinch