I have not made it a secret that I feel GoToMeeting is one of the best screen sharing tools available out there, and though I had no complaints about Glance which was my previous default screen sharing tool of choice, it has taken me little to switch to GoToMeeting for the extra features and advantages it offers.

Recently, I have spent some time with the up-and-coming Beta 2.0 release of GoToMeeting as an official tester and while things are still to be improved and refined quite a bit before final release, I am positively impressed by the new additions I have been using.

Among the most interesting new ones:

1) a recording facility

2) live annotation and mark-up tools

3) selective application sharing

My overall testing time with the new GoToMeeting Beta 2.0 has been just over a week and I must say that the results have been in general quite good.

The changes and additions that G2M has added are the right moves to make this already very competitive tool a very-hard to beat low-cost alternative for easy PC-based screen-sharing.

Once again, keeping in mind that this is still a version under wraps and that much may still change before the final public release, here are my first humble personal impressions about this new forthcoming GoToMeeting release.

GoToMeeting remains very stable, rather fast to load and not inclined to generate errors of any kind.

The tool is very simple to operate, at least when compared to its broader competition, and sports a user-interface that greatly facilitates the use for non-technical users.

The command buttons are very visibly displayed and the overall interface panel occupies only a limited part of the screen when fully opened. When screen sharing the interface is minimized to a very small control panel that allows access to all key basic functionalities.

The annotation tools are a nice addition, too bad they still reflect most of this industry limitations, when it comes to understanding what is really needed to do this annotating job right. The emphasizer tool is not bad at all and the real-time red laser is truly optimal. The rest is not really that great, but better to have it than not.

It is also possible for the presenter/moderator to enable all participants annotation tools so that anyone can live annotate the content being presented.

The recording facility is a great addition, and the support for Microsoft .WMA makes it possible to easily distribute recordings. Operation is absolutely straightforward and resulting quality is quite acceptable. The recording feature is certainly a big plus for GoToMeeting as it allows to easily memorize a training session or a demonstration that can be re-used later.

GoToMeeting allows recording both in a standard .WMA file format as well as into its own proprietary one. The advantage of recording in the GoToMeeting own proprietary format is only that there is no extra processing time required to achieve this. Once the recording is stopped, it is ready to be viewed by any GoToMeeting user having Windows Media Player 9 installed on his PC.

By investing some extra post-processing time to the recorded file it is also possible to convert it into a plain WMA file which can be viewed by computer users on all computer platforms.

Other new and notable additions include:

• Lotus Notes Integration


• upgraded Group Management facility


• Custom Branding via integration of a company logo


• Attendance Reporting

To be improved:

The new annotation and mark-up tools are hard to find. Unless you know where they are, it maybe next to impossible to find the key to access them.

The mini-control panel in which access to the new annotation tools is hidden - it is the last icon on the bottom (black arrow)

The icon giving access to these new tools is in fact located on the mini vertical control panel that is shown once GoToMeeting has been minimized to the right side of the screen. Within that set of few icons a new one has been added with the shape of a mouse icon. By clicking it you can now get immediate access to four live annotation and mark-up tools: pen, highlighter, spotlight and arrow.

GoToMeeting seems to be attempting to be wanting to advertise its new release as capable of doing also audio recording. While this is technically true, it should be clearly specified that the audio recording can comprise your own voice as spoken into your computer microphone. With additional software like Skype, it is also possible to obtain a recording of the other person(s) voices by recording their output coming from the speakers via your own microphone. Not the most high quality or orthodox solution, but possibly good enough for some situations.

The issue here in my view is not to mislead the potential buyer into thinking that the full recording of multiple people having a voice conversation running parallel to a GoToMeeting-based screen sharing session can be easily and effectively achieved.

Also to be improved is the ease with which the presenter/moderator can find and access back the recordings made. For now this is not terribly intuitive and it may take a while for a non-technical user to find where the recordings end up.

While GoToMeeting introduces a new feature allowing an account owner to upload an image to be used inside the "pausing" screen that G2M displays when screen sharing is not active, I remain eager to see the bottom section of the interface becoming available for personal branding and customization beyond simple logo display.

For that matter a web-based area in that section could well provide me with presence awareness information coming from at least two of the major IM networks.

The text chat facility is still not up to snuff with established features and tools expected by online users. I wonder why, on well-established facilities like this companies are still playing naive, when the complete default feature set of a good text chat facility is well known since a few years. For example: why URLs typed in the text chat area do not display as clickable links? Why, if selected in the preferences, one cannot display a date/time stamp for each message exchanged? Why no a few basic, essential emoticons?

Overall, I am positively impressed with this early Beta of GoTomeeting and would be expecting the product development to make further improvements and refinements before the final release planned for next month.

Stay tuned.