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	Convoq ASAP

Weak Points

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Convoq ASAP is a new conferencing and live presentation technology, innovating in many areas, and introducing new ways of managing meetings and real-time communications effectively.

Convoq is a company that has invested a great deal of time and resources to extensively test and refine its tool before launching its first public version.

Nonetheless the above, also ASAP, as every new tool coming to market, needs some time to discover and correct some its own limitations, idiosyncracies and bugs.

Here are some of Convoq ASAP first release limitations and weak points:

Screen Sharing. Convoq ASAP integrates a screen sharing function allowing the presenter to share a live view of either its full desktop or of anyone specific application open on its computer. The functionality works but it does not always respond to controls has expected and it maybe difficult to activate and manage until someone guides you to understand the details and imposed control limitations that exist to use it. Access and use could be greatly improved.

Audio delay is particularly significant and makes even two people conversations not as smooth as they could be. The delay amounts presently to at least 400-500 milliseconds under the best circumstances.
Audio and video streams present a noticeable delay between them. While under a good Internet connection this limitation is reduced to a few hundred milliseconds delay, there is no effective lip-synch between the audio and video. This is typical of the Flash Communication Server utilized in this tool, which, while greatly effective for its ease of use and compatibility with all platforms supporting Flash, still presents some performance limitations, at least when compared with other competing audio and videoconferencing tools (WaveThree Session, SightSpeed, Viditel, Linktivity WebDemo, etc.).

The live markup and annotation toolset lacks some essential tools like basic drawing shapes and choice for different line widths.

Only a maximum of two video windows can be displayed at anyone time.

PowerPoint presentations need to be uploaded each time a presentation is delivered. There is no way to upload and keep one or more presentations ready for delivery.

The uploading of PowerPoint presentations may result a bit new to many users as one is required to save the Powerpoint presentation in a special proprietary Flash format that can be read only by Convoq ASAP. While Convoq does an excellent job at installing and integrating a PowerPoint Converter Pro module into your local PowerPoint application, novice users will need to grasp the process being done and its relevance before getting swift at this. In all frankness Convoq has now made this process as simple and as foolproof as possible and while it is annoying to have to resave existing presentations in this new format, the results are certainly worthwhile the extra effort.
It is not possible to send an instant message directly to your IM contact from within ASAP. End users can send only files, emails or invitations to their listed contacts

The contact/presence list does not yet allow to filter out from view those users that are not online, leaving a very crowded and hard to manage list of names to be handled by the end user.
Little usability/technical bugs prevent some functions to be activated and turned off as easily as expected (video stream, screen sharing, etc.)

Since Convoq ASAP provides a very rich set of facilities to manage messages, pending meetings and other information, the design approach and the information design of its feedback displays can be further improved to facilitate more immediate understanding of all messages and dialog boxes displayed.

No recording facility.

No native Web touring facility. (need to use "screen sharing" to achieve this, with relative pros and cons - e.g.: speed, quality of images, bandwidth required, capability to co-scroll, etc.)

« Key Strengths | Main | PowerPoint Presentation Facilities »

Posted on March 31, 2004 at 07:42 AM

Updated on April 05, 2004 at 08:01 AM

Weak Points

PowerPoint Presentation Facilities

Web Touring - Co-Browsing

Presence Awareness

Multi-Protocol IM

Audio Conferencing - VoIP

Video Conferencing

Desktop - Application Sharing

Annotation Features - Whiteboard

Moderator Controls

Participant Controls

Event Management

Cross-Platform Compatibility

Browser Compatibility

Firewall Friendliness

Setup - Installation

Customer Support

System Requirements

Interface Customization - Branding

Convoq ASAP

Linktivity WebDemo

VoiceCafe OfficeMaster

VoiceCafe SalesMaster

VoiceCafe VideoCom

Voxwire MeetingRoom

WebConference.com

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