
				Facilities			Products


	Glance

Weak Points

« Key Strengths | Main | PowerPoint Presentation Facilities »

Glance has very few weak points due to the simplicity and limited scope of its tool.

Glance requires a good 56 K line to shine. At 33.6 and 28.8 it can be used, but it won't be a smooth experience for your participants. It would also consume too much bandwidth to normally allow you a concurrent VoIP session.

There are no controls to set/optimize color depth during a session. Having the ability to control color depth would allow advanced users/presenters to best optimize the distribution and performance of their presentation, especially when many dial-up participants were involved (not an issue in the US but an everyday reality in much of the rest of the world).

There is no option to see who and how many are the users that have actually joined into a session. You are informed by a sound alert when one joins, but if you are using the one-to-many version, and if you have invited several participants, you don't know who they are.

There is no easy way to copy and paste the URL and access code for a session to another document which would further simplify the high usability of this tool.

No complementary tool is available to support the online collaboration. A minimalist text chat/instant message tool would have provided probably a useful addition without compromising the unique approach of Glance.

If your screens are both set to the same resolution, your online session participants are going to miss about 5% of the bottom part of your screen and 3% of the right hand side of it. They will all need to scroll to see those sections.

You cannot leave a session "open". That is: Glance does not allow you to eep broadcasting a session when there are no participants in a session. That means that if a participant in a one-to-one session leaves the Glance session for whatever reason, the session will be closed also on the host and a new session will need to be restarted (and a new code communicated to the participant(s)).

There are collaborative situations in which it would be very advantageous to leave a session open allowing several people to come by and see something that is happening at a certain Glance virtual space. Like WebTrain does with its ecommerce facility integrated into the access to the recording of event sessions I would much like to see a possibility for people to sell easily access to public sessions.

On the other hand is very inconvenient from a usability standpoint to have to close and restart a session everytime your session co-participant has a crash on his PC. I would much appreciate being able to keep a session open for as long as I need. If this is an issue of cost for Glance, I would be willing to submit my credit card and be charged for whatever extra fee this will cost (when I use it).

Voice-over-IP could be also well integrated as well without adding any further major controls the non-existing interface.
The above could be offered as options to the basic service, in order to provide the greatest benefit, modularity and variety of choices to the final user.

While I do strongly respect Glance minimalist approach I need also to challenge and question assumptions and company positions which maybe too entrenched and static due to little outside competition.

« Key Strengths | Main | PowerPoint Presentation Facilities »

Posted on September 23, 2003 at 09:25 AM

Updated on September 26, 2003 at 09:10 AM

Overview

Key Strengths

Weak Points