Antarya Boardroom is a new Web conferencing and real-time collaboration tool that integrates several well designed facilities.
Antarya Boardroom is part of a set of real-time collaboration tools that are devoted to cover all of the needs of the emerging wired enterprise.
Inside Antarya text chat and VoIP are available to all participants, while the presenter/moderator has exclusive rights over the key presentation facilities available:
1) InstaPresenter
This facility allows the easy broadcast of PowerPoint presentations which are converted on-the-fly on the presenter's PC and immediately made available for others to see. Slides can be annotated live and the presenter can hand-out the control of the presentation to anyone of the participants.
2) RemoteShare
This tool provides easy and immediate access to full desktop sharing or to a select application that the presenter wants to have everyone see. Control on the application can be also provided to a remote user, who, while not having the application running on her computer, can actually edit and manipulate data inside of it.
3) InstaWord
The InstaWord facility provides the ability to co-edit any Word document. Editing control can be easily transferred from one participant to the next. Edits are published instantly on all other participants PCs. The final edited file can be saved as a standard .doc file locally by each one of the attendees.
4) InstaPoll
InstaPoll is a simple to use polling facility that allows the presenter/moderator to run multiple choice questions to the participants with extreme simplicity and to display live statistics of the result obtained to all atending participants.
Overall this is an interesting new Web conferencing technology, which may provide good ease of use and a number of quite useful facilities ready to be used.
A "recording" facility is integrated in the Antarya Boardroom and provides full archiving ability for any online event.
Pros:
Co-editing documents works very effectively
Files can be transferred to any particpant easily
Application sharing performs
PowerPoint presentation do not need to be uploaded before the event
Double set of emoticons
All data are encrypted using 128 bit algorithms
Cons:
Not easy to start a meeting on the fly
VoIP quality mediocre
Text chat window too small - limited features - no formatting - no auto-URLs
Not able to move other participants in different "area" when more than one facility is open (outside of alerting them via text chat or voice)
Some interface controls need to be refined (e.g.: VoIP activation)
Prices not available.
Demonstrations available by contacting Levare at:
http://www.antarya.com/AboutUs_Contact.htm
