Weak Points

The Linktivity WebDemo user experience is negatively affected through several shortcomings, of which at least some can probably be easily fixed.

PowerPoint presentations: WebDemo does not feature a full-blown, dedicated facility to run PowerPoint slideshow presentations. Presenters need to use WebDemo's Desktop Sharing feature to conduct a presentation. Desktop Sharing is an unsuitable facility for this purpose because it doesn't offer the specific components required by slideshow presenters.

Voice Chat: the meeting presenter's voice is disabled when a WebDemo meeting starts. This is not a logical approach and may confuse the meeting attendees.

Text Chat: this feature is too rudimentary, lacking a printing facility, date/time stamps and url recognition.

Event Management: this module (called My Office in WebDemo) contains a flaw that requires a meeting host to select the following date instead of the desired one in order to display meetings of a certain date in the past. For example, a meeting created on December 19th 2004 will only show up if December 20th 2004 is selected.

Meetings invitations can only be handed out by email, not with a direct link.

Usability: sometimes two or more consecutive steps are required to activate WebDemo functionalities. For example: to broadcast live video images meeting presenters need to first enable the functionality from the host control panel and then need to press the Broadcast Video button in the Video Conferencing window. Though it is useful that meeting presenters get the chance to configure their screen settings before actually starting their broadcast, the attendees do not know why the video broadcast screen is black. This same behavior happens with desktop sharing.

Though compact, the WebDemo user interface can be daunting for some less-experienced users.

Error messages like "The selected control is not active" are not helpful. This particular message appears when the meeting host clicks on the microphone button in the host control panel with the intent to hand the microphone to one of the attendees. If it is so unclear to this meeting host that the voice chat feature needs to be enabled before it can be opened to the attendees, it would probably be more helpful if the system would inform the meeting host which specific feature control needs to be activated and in which sequence.

Cross-Platform Compatibility: WebDemo is a Windows-only client-server application that heavily relies on Microsoft products. The host software needs to be installed on a Windows server running Microsoft IIS, the recommended browser is Internet Explorer and the Java client applets run better with the Microsoft Java Virtual Machine than with Sun's Java Virtual Machine. Macintosh and Linux users cannot host the Linktivity WebDemo server and cannot access WebDemo meetings as a host or participant.

Browser Compatibility: WebDemo only supports the Internet Explorer and Netscape browsers. Other popular browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Opera and browsers based on the Internet Explorer engine are not supported.

Customer Support (Documentation): except for the online user guide, which is accessible through the host control panel, all other public WebDemo documentation seems to reflect older versions of the software. Examples are white papers, faq documents and the knowledge base. Moreover, these support documents seem to be still hosted on the website of Converging Technologies, the previous owner of the Linktivity.