Facilities   Products
 

 

 
NetMeeting

Weak Points

« Key Strengths | Main | PowerPoint Presentation Facilities »

  • Microsoft is withdrawing support for NetMeeting in an official way. Microsoft NetMeeting directories are not acessible anymore forcing NetMeeting users to have to learn each time the IP address of the person they want to contact.
  • "On the heels of being ordered to pay Eolas $521 million for infringement on a browser-related patent, Microsoft has lost yet another patent case. This time, Redmond's been ordered to shell out $62 million for infringement on a Web conferencing patent belonging to SPX Corp. Fortunately for Microsoft, the infringing product is NetMeeting, a technology the company is phasing out in favor of its recently acquired Live Meeting (PlaceWare) service." Source.
  • NetMeeting may provide a little headache to those connecting from behind a firewall, router or from behind certain proxy configurations. Though there are a number of solutions around these issues, I would not recommend the use of this tool to people that would need to operate it frequently under such conditions (going through firewalls, proxies, routers). While within an Intranet or between direct dial-up connections there are little technical issues to be faced, these may get quite more complex once you are on a LAN (local area network) and/or are connecting to the Internet while passing through firewalls, proxies or a router NAT.
  • Application sharing offers no way of monitoring what is being shared and there is no visual notification reminding the presenter that an application is being shared.
  • There is not as much backward-compatibility as there should be with previous versions of NetMeeting, as many of the in-meeting options (like feature-specific blocking by the host) only work with other users of version 3.0.
  • No controls are available to compensate for the differences in computer screen resolutions and monitor sizes that participants in a live conference may have. (If the presenter has her screen set at 1024*768 and a participant has his screen set at 800*600 the participant may not be able to see all of what the presenter is displaying on her screen.)
  • NetMeeting’s audio and video features work only between two participants, so a three-way call cannot be established.
  • NetMeeting setup is time-consuming and non-technical users can easily get frustrated.

 

« Key Strengths | Main | PowerPoint Presentation Facilities »


Posted on June 13, 2003 at 05:08 PM

Updated on March 29, 2004 at 08:44 AM

 

 

Weak Points

 

 

NetMeeting

 

About | Full Guide Access | Table of Contents | Last Updates Last Updates Of Robin Good's Official Guide To Web Conferencing