GoToMeeting: Our Review of this Web Conferencing Tool

What is GoToMeeting?

GoToMeeting is a relatively new product from a long-standing networking company, Citrix Online LLC. With it, you can show your live screen to someone who is far away. They see what you see. If your mouse pointer moves, they see that too.

What Happened Between Me And GoToMeeting

Dealing with a large, automated company like Citrix can often be a rocky experience. Let me tell you about mine.

GoToMeeting offers a month-long free trial, but they give you this only if you furnish them your credit card details. If you don’t cancel within the free month, they automatically charge your card for the next month.

Of course this has been an acceptable practice in the brick and mortar world. Sure, we’ve seen it used by book clubs, record clubs and gift clubs.

But in my opinion the Internet is more of a permission-based medium. I’m used to being asked, “Your free trial ends tomorrow. If you would like to continue using our service, please subscribe to the plan of your choice at abc.com/signup.php.”

So you can imagine my dismay when my credit card was charged $50 without adequate notice. I immediately emailed them and asked them to refund, which they did within a day… apparently they are used to this situation. (In response to this review, the GoToMeeting support staff have pointed out that there is an option to disable automatic billing).

But the fact is that it left a bitter taste in my mouth.

However…

After two weeks, I began to miss GoToMeeting because it made a big difference to The Magnum Group’s marketing and production activities. I therefore signed up for their basic $50 a month plan, and we continue to be subscribers as of this writing.

You see, one of our major business lines is providing expert CAD services to the international market. We create extremely complex engineering and architectural drawings.

Sometimes we have questions about these drawings that call for a discussion with the customer.  It is much simpler to have this discussion with the drawing in front of the customer than with no drawing.

This is possible with GotoMeeting. We launch the drawing on our screen and the customer sees it on theirs as well. Also with GoToMeeting, either of us can move the mouse pointer and point to particular spots in the drawing.

I would approximate that questions about drawings can be resolved twice as fast with these features (which are collectively called “screen sharing”, “online meeting”, “web collaboration”, “net meeting” or “web conferencing”) than with only voice communication.

Only Voice vs GoToMeeting

With only voice communication, the conversation would run something like this:
“Hey John, look at the top of the drawing between longitudes 8 and 10. You see the first instance of the block L2-FAV4? Near that do you see the 300mm diameter inlet duct in orange? You see the duct bend just before it joins L2-FAV4? Well that duct bend is what I need to ask you about… “

With GoToMeeting the conversation would be just, “Hey John, look here,” as I pointed to the appropriate spot on the screen and John saw it.

Oh, and of course, John is also mighty impressed with this demonstration of technological prowess and resources. (GoToMeeting has a tendency of branding users as experts.)

Additional features of GoToMeeting are simultaneous chat during screen sharing, markup with a virtual highlighter as well as screen recording. We have not needed the first two and have been unable to make the third function satisfactorily with audio (no big deal).

In Closing

When all is said and done,  GoToMeeting makes communication with customers more time-efficient and builds their confidence in you by leaps and bounds. Any company that is at the cutting edge of technology must possess it, else appear in a poor light alongside rivals who use it.

The GoToMeeting Free Trial is available here . If your business involves discussing documents in detail with remote clients, please give the product a whirl (and be sure to disable the option for automatic billing after the trial period). You might find, like we did, that it is a powerful project execution and marketing tool.

Good luck!

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