Live Conference PRO, developed by Professional Global Marketing, is a powerful low cost web conferencing and live presentation tool that allows meeting presenters to collaborate in real-time with invited participants.
It integrates several well designed facilities including full-duplex VoIP audio, co-browsing, text chat, whiteboard, desktop sharing, file sharing and video conferencing.

The voice conferencing facility is good, and although it does not offer as much for the buck as some of the top performers in this class, it supports VoIP over dial-up lines and good quality audio. Live Conference Pro adds also an effective hands-free talking option that, once selected, lets you communicate without the need to hold or press down any button.

The Co-Browsing function worked well when the "push URL" button was used to transmit pages to the participants. However, the "follow-me" function did not perform as expected, it did not automatically update the participants as the presenter moved to new web pages.

Ordinarily, your audience would have to select the required tool as you, the presenter, switch between whiteboard, video conferencing and desktop/ application sharing. By selecting the "Synchronized Tools" option in the Tools/Features Menu, the presenter allows the audience to follow from tool to tool without having to physically do anything.

There is a basic text chat facility that can be expanded on the screen, and it is equipped with auto-URL detection, emoticons and a "raise hand" feature for impromptu polling or attracting the presenter's attention. It also allows users to select and copy text for pasting into another application.

Another useful feature is a whiteboard that can be exported in BMP/JPG/GIF format. It has freehand drawing, object creation (ellipses and rectangles), text and image insertion facilities. To delete something from the whiteboard, you have to use the cursor tool.

Live Conference PRO provides a desktop/application sharing facility with a set of annotation tools and a screen pointer, but does not allow the users to resize the displayed portion of the screen in real time. I felt that there were too many steps needed before display actually began.

The File Transfer manager tool, used to send files to selected participants during a meeting sessions, is not intuitive for someone new to the tool.

Video conferencing is fully integrated without the need for any further installation or download. A useful video setting allows users to set the frame rate to find the right balance between available bandwidth, hardware and desired video performance.

Live Conference PRO offers a good PowerPoint Presentation facility, that operates either by leveraging the PowerPoint application installed on end users PCs or by converting slides into JPG images for final delivery.

Live Conference Pro integrates a text chat recording facility as well as full audio recorder.

The system also provides an extensive array of moderator controls. The presenter may grant the activation of individual features to each one of the meeting participants.

In general, I liked Live Conference PRO. It is, for the most part, easy to use and has a clean and quite intuitive user interface. The tools perform reliably, has plenty of collaboration and conferencing features, and it accommodates also participants on dial-up connections. Last but not least, it is priced attractively with a "no nonsense" pricing structure that should appeal to companies of all sizes.

Recommended.

More info: http://www.liveconferencepro.com/

Pricing: Unlimited live meetings at $14.95 per month

System requirements: http://www.liveconferencepro.com/userreq.html

Free trial: http://liveconferencepro.com/trial.html