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	VCOM Central

Weak Points

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This is not a company in which I could place my trust. Their interest is only and simply to make money. While this is certainly a fine proposition for a commercial enterprise, it gets in the way when in order to achieve that, truth is veiled, half-truths are said, and marketing hype, over-promising and bad customer support reign supreme.

I will point your attention to four basic elements that tell you a lot about this company:

The VCOM Central Web site. (http://www.vcomcentral.net/) Look at it and tell me if you can trust a company that can show only one page to people trying to find out more. VCOM Central would certainly reply that their home page is not meant to inform and that one should go to one of their marketing agents Web sites. Look at one of these (mine at http://www.vcomcentral.net/my/luigicanali) and see if these six (badly designed) Web pages could seriously help me as a marketing agent to communicate VCOM features and its credibility effectively to my own customers.
The manual for the VCOM tool. The manual is made up of just one and a half pages of text in a .PDF file. In the manual, features are stated which are actually not available in the VCOM tool. For example, on page two of this PDF manual is written:

"Share Window: This will start the window sharing. To select a window to share, use the mouse! You can click on a window to bring it to the foreground. Once there, a blue border will be drawn around the window the mouse is pointing at. To share that window, right click on it."

This feature has not been available on the VCOM tool for several months. Note that I have reported this and all other issues in writing to VCOM directly or to my "in-line" VCOM marketing agent above me.
The award proudly displayed on VCOM Central home page, appearing also on every agent web site.

This one smelled funky from the first moment I saw it. I did my own research to find out why and for what reason a Golden Web Award had been awarded to VCOM Central. Though their technology could have apparently deserved it, the site and the way it was promoted left much to be desired for deserving any kind of award at all.

The Golden Web Award is awarded by the International Association of Webmasters and Designers at http://www.iawmd.com/.
At http://www.goldenwebawards.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi there is a facility to verify awards assigned by this association. I searched for VCOM Central and found out that VCOM has indeed been awarded a prize but for something quite inexplicable to me. Look yourself at this URL: http://www.goldenwebawards.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi? search=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.vcomcentral.net&command=1

On this Web page you can read:
"The site denise is a proud winner of the 2001- 2002 Golden Web Award".
Denise? If that smells OK to you...
The scarcity of information available about the top management of this company. Since their names and photos are nicely displayed at http://www.vcomcentral.net/my/luigicanali/founders.html I have taken the time to search for each one of them on the major search engines. I could not find anything about these guys. If they are so good and successful as they claim to be, why can't I find any information at all about them? To make things even less credible the name and picture of the VCOM marketing manager has recently disappeared from this page. If the marketing is out, then that is not a good sign.

Also:

The interface has been designed for an 800 by 600 resolution screen. If you run at higher resolutions and maximize the Orbitalk interface, the next time you log in your panes will be not positioned correctly, and this may even prevent you from using them. To get out of this annoying situation you need to select "Reset Screen to Default" from the File Menu, and then you need to exit and re-enter the virtual room. This is quite annoying as the resolution of most users around the world has recently switched to 1024*768.

The panes can be resized and stretched by the user, but this is not an easy operation, because of the panes design. Also the technology is not able to maintain the new layout at the start of a new session without creating some fastidious display problems.
Too much space is reserved to the attendee list pane and to the text chat window. Ideally this should be fully collapsible or have the option of being switched on or off. Their presence, in all three possible layouts limits an ideal display of presentation slides or even Web sites that have been designed with a fixed width.

« Key Strengths | Main | PowerPoint Presentation Facilities »

Posted on June 18, 2003 at 04:58 PM

Updated on November 17, 2003 at 03:05 PM

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

Linktivity WebDemo

VCOM Central

VoiceCafe OfficeMaster

VoiceCafe SalesMaster

VoiceCafe VideoCom

Voxwire MeetingRoom

WebConference.com

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