"You get what you pay for" - that was my initial thought after my first experience of Dim Dim on Friday's session of FO2010.
We paid nothing and got not a lot; that said the experience was valuable and provided the opportunity to try a free platform. As much as I would love to be supporting free and open sources like this, I feel there needs to be more development of them before they work efficiently.
The faciliators Claire & Malcolm had prepared the best they could, but the functionality of the platform was just not good enough to run a cohesive online meeting. The time delays were frustrating and not practical when so many of us are strapped for time and juggling at the best of times!
Claire & Malcolm are to be congratulated on giving this a go and the professionalism they showed by putting plan B into action and moving the meeting to the more familiar Elluminate room. Claire sharing her desktop for the slide show with Wayne was brilliant.
I'm not going to discount Dim Dim completley, but perhaps would consider it for a one-to-one meeting rather than a larger group.
Sharon-
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry to hear you had difficulties on Friday. We have many free meetings happening every day, I'd like to better understand what you encountered. When you have a moment, please drop me a note directly at kevin@dimdim.com.
Thanks!
-k
Kevin Micalizzi, Community Manager
Dimdim Web Conferencing
e: kevin@dimdim.com
twitter: @dimdim
facebook: dimdim.com/facebook
Hi Sharon, I understand your concerns but I think you've been a tad harsh on DimDim. I have been to some great meetings using DimDim...I think it was bad luck for us that it didn't work very well on Friday...those technology gremlins having great fun. It might be worth having another try...if we've got time during the course, I'll see if we can set up another session. The other thing we can do is get Kevin and his team to support us...ask him to run a proper demonstration for us...would you be up for that, Kevin?
ReplyDeleteSarah :)
Hi Sharon,
ReplyDeleteThe audio delay was one of the main problems with our DimDim session. That and the fact that I couldn't hand over presenter control to Wayne.
I was contacted by a representative from DimDim and when I commented on the audio delay she replied that the free accounts do not have dedicated server space, but with paid pro accounts you do get this. As my account was a 30 day ProTrial account (so that we could have more than 10 people in the room, and the ability to record, share desktop etc) I was a little surprised that it wasn't set up a little better. If you're trying to encourage people to sign up for paid accounts I'd have thought that you'd want the trial Pro account experience to be as close to the paid experience as possible. Perhaps Kevin can comment on this.
I should end by saying that I do understand that companies like DimDim are businesses that employ people and need to generate cash. Their Pro accounts are relatively reasonable (starting at $25 per month--presumably in US dollars). I think that most of us in the FO2010 course went into this thinking of DimDim as a great *free* alternative to applications such as Elluminate. Perhaps we'd have done better if we went into it looking at DimDim as great *low cost* alternative to Elluminate.