Do you need an easy-to-use web conferencing solution that will also allow you to show your screen to your attendees? Then you might be interested in checking out Zoho Meeting, which does all that for free.

Zoho Meeting is the latest addition to the Zoho Office Suite and it is an online meeting service which lets you show/share your desktop online, conduct web meetings as well as provide remote assistance to other users.

This tool is very simple and participants can join any meeting from Mac or Linux computers, although the presenter must be on a Windows platform. I have spent some time testing Zoho Meeting and here is what I found out:

Zoho Meeting: key functionalities

Zoho Meeting is a very convenient web conferencing platform: it is free to use and flawlessly integrated with all the other tools belonging to the Zoho Office Suite. During the current beta phase, there is no limit to the number of participants and to the number of meetings which can be created.

Create a meeting and get it started

Scheduling a new meeting is a very simple operation: you just need to fill in the name of the meeting, the starting date and time. You can also add notes, along with the emails of the participants. Once you have created your meeting all the attendees will receive an email displaying all the meeting details and giving them an URL to join the meeting.

Zoho Meeting also allows you to embed a link to your web conferencing room int any web page, allowing users to easily join the conference room.

Once you start the meeting a little toolbar appears on your screen, showing you what you can do: chat, show your screen, invite participants and view the participants list.

Chat

The chat box doesn't allow to send private messages to the other users and it doesn't support auto-URL (which are both very limiting characteristics). The maximum number of characters allowed per message is 35 and a time stamp appears near each message that is sent.

Screen sharing

Presenters (who must be on a Windows computer) can show their screen to the other attendees (even if they are on a Mac or Linux computer). The screen sharing quality is very good and the maximum delay I have experienced while being on the viewer side was three seconds.

However, while other users can be allowed to remote control the screen of the presenter, the presenter role cannot be passed to other users during the meeting. There is no possibility to annotate over the screen while presenting and it is also impossible to take screenshots or record the screen sharing session.

Participants invitation and management

The presenter can add participants while creating the meeting and also during the meeting itself: she will simply have to click on the proper button that appears on the mini toolbar and enter the email of the person she wants to invite.

The presenter can visualize the list of all the participants but she cannot perform actions within the participants list (e.g. she cannot right click on the names of the participants to send a private message or give them control over her screen)

System requirements

Zoho Meeting supports the following browsers :

• Internet Explorer 5.5+


• Firefox 1.5+


• Safari (on Mac)

For now, the presenter (the person whose desktop is shared) has to be on a Windows PC (2000/XP/Vista) - Mac support coming soon. Participants, however, can be on any OS (Windows, Linux, Mac)

Price

Zoho Meeting is free to use.

Learn more

Watch the Zoho Meeting demo video.

Check out the Help section if you have issues with Zoho Meeting.

Read the FAQs related to Zoho Meeting.

Try it out

Open a free Zoho account and you will be able to access the full online Zoho Office Suite.

Editor's comments

Zoho Meeting is a web conferencing tool that can suit groups of people who don't need a sophisticated platform in order to communicate.

Among the positive traits of this product I want to mention there are certainly the simplicity of the set up process and the invitation management, which are always straightforward and efficient. Another strong point is the very good quality of the screen sharing performance, which is one of the best I have seen so far in similar tools.

The possibilty to embed the web conferencing room into any website is also a valuable feature that is not available in other free web conferencing systems.

However, some significant negative traits emerge from this test: the lack of annotation tools and the impossibility to change the presenter during the meeting are certainly noticeable.

Moreover, the text chat doesn't show advanced features (such as private messaging), as well as basic features which are available in almost all the web conferencing tools I have recently reviewed (among which there is the auto-URL feature, which is not available in Zoho Meeting).

Zoho Meeting is still in its beta phase and certainly many of the issues I have been able to identify will be solved with the release of the first alpha version; however, a first look at this tool revealed that some good work has yet to be done and it will be interesting to discover how Zoho Meeting will develop in the next future.