
				Facilities			Products


	Conferral

Weak Points

« Key Strengths | Main | PowerPoint Presentation Facilities »

The lack of a standard text chat facility is probably Conferral’s major drawback. No VoIP or other real-time communication channel is integrated in the tool.

Conferral requires the presenter to be on a Windows PC. Macs, Linux and other operating systems are supported only for attendees.

Some of the Conferral features, like video or the remote access file library require that you have your original host PC containing those files to be switched on and connected to the Internet when invited guests click on the invitation links for those features to work as expected. While this is nothing negative per se, users of web conferencing and online collaboration tools have come to expect features to be enabled even when their own PC is not available, let alone connected to the Internet. Conferral in fact does not do enough in making these issues immediately transparent and evident to the user as they should be.

Though the Conferral interface is very simple, it still suffers a bit in providing an immediate and completely intuitive experience to the final user, due some limitations to the organization, labeling and grouping of commands and facilities.

Layout, organization and labeling of interface components could be somewhat improved. Commands are not always intuitive and positioned in ways that simplify their use. Use of proprietary, non-standard terms like Screen-Confer for screen sharing, or "Reduce Colors" may confuse non-technical users, who have already to master and learn a whole new paradigm of communication. Commands and facilities need to be upfront, consistently labeled, easy and immediate to understand for anyone.

The Conferral software is installed on the host/presenter PC. When the presenter connects from another computer, she will need to download and re-install the Conferral presenter software again in the new PC she is using.

The presenter has little control over the management of attendees. The Conferral presenter cannot eject unwanted participants from a live meeting.

Conferral lacks also mark-up and live annotation facilities, a must-have tool set for anyone needing to effectively train, support, showcase or present at a distance.

« Key Strengths | Main | PowerPoint Presentation Facilities »

Posted on September 27, 2005 at 10:50 AM

Updated on October 12, 2005 at 10:07 AM

Overview

Key Strengths

Weak Points