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Tools for Web meetings?
(3 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
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This is a bit of a coincidence… I’m prepping to do a presentation over the phone/Web in a few minutes and ran across this post by Ross Brunson on the SUSE Linux Enterprise in the Americas blog about “12 tools for kick-ass Web meetings.”
The only problem is, most if not all of the tools are not open source or even necessarily compatible with Linux.
I’d like to be able to do more multimedia presentations for groups that I can’t meet in person, or at least can’t meet at a given date — and I think it’d be a good thing to have a list of online meeting tools for the openSUSE community in general.
I’m not just talking about IRC or IM — though those are very effective as well, and conference calls tend to be a bit lacking without some visual components.
So, I’m throwing this out to the lazyweb: What kind of online conference/collaboration tools do we have available for Linux users that might make it easy to meet and collaborate online? I’m thinking of tools that are useful for one-to-many conversations (presenations) and many-to-many collaboration sessions. Bonus points for tools that are located in the openSUSE repos… 
There aren’t any good solutions. “Conferencing” has been point-to-point for many developers (take a look at Ekiga etc, completely forgotten area to really support real conferencing). The best bets even nowadays are VIC and RAT, sadly.
It is sad especially as with gstreamer there are already video/audio/im/groupchat/filesharing/etc plugins available. Wrapping up something actually usable should not be much of a work. Alas, there has not been genuine vision. Add up also some networked scheduling (how to ask people to meetings), drawingboard, and a way to record meetings properly using those new gstreamer based capabilities => real conferencing.
Hi Zonker.
I have a tip for you. Novell have a product called Teaming + Conferencing.
http://www.novell.com/products/teaming/index.html
This is built on top of the open source project called ICEcore.
http://www.icecore.org/
Not sure if ICEcore is packaged in openSUSE but wouldn’t it be great if it was. Showing how Novell and the openSUSE community lives together, and that open source projects and Novells product lines live together?
Warm Regards,
Claes Backstrom
Yes, the ICEcore product is a good one, it’s not packaged up in openSUSE yet, but it’s extremely easy to install.
I was actually being a lazy/busy blogger and reposting something I found elsewhere, but that’s a good topic to consider doing a quality post for.
Thanks,
RossB