Vyew Web Conferencing

If you work online and need a web conferencing tool, you may want to check out Vyew. View is a free web conferencing service that also lets you share your desktop.

Features of Vyew

• Vyew lets you share your desktop. Remote file storage lets you share documents and other files. You can also take/listen to presentations.
• There’s a whiteboard tool that lets you draw out and share ideas as well as share comments.
• You can draw, annotate, and make comments (and share these).
• Each user can create and save multiple VyewBooks (2 max for the Free plan).
• Teleconferences can have a maximum of 20 participants for the Free plan.
• Vyew’s shared whiteboard has “object layering and filtering” which lets you determine who contributed what, allowing drawn/ written”objects” to be rearranged or moved to other pages.
• Google Search and Yahoo Maps can be used when you are in the conference.
• You can import documents from Microsoft Office and other compatible files (e.g., PDF, images, etc.) from your hard drive or from an URL into the workspace.

The pros of Vyew

• As of this writing, Vyew is running in beta mode.
• It’s free and web-based, so there’s nothing to install.
• You can have multiple conference sessions with Vyew.
• You have the option of a free plan and two different paid plans
  (Plus, Professional), with multi-year discounts on the paid options.

The cons of Vyew

• You can capture a screenshot of your computer desktop, but I didn’t see any simple way to export the contents of the Vyew workspace.
• Vyew is compatible with IE 5.5 and above, Firefox 1.4 and above, and Safari web browsers only.
• You need JDK 1.5 installed on your machine to use the ‘desktop sharing’ feature with Vyew.
• Vyew does not work with SSL.
• You need to register to use the file explorer (with which you can import files into a workspace). But to complete registration, you have to specify all sorts of personal information, including your sex, which always bugs me to no end. What has that got to do with my use of your product? Don’t force me to take your user survey just to register and write about your service.

Other than my beef about the registration, Vyew looks like a very robust, easy to use web conferencing tool with lots of great collaboration features. These sorts of tools always excite me because they enable both collaboration and online tutoring, both core components of an electronic global village. What would make it really shine is if there were a way to export workspace contents (or at least have the menu item be more obvious).