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8x8 Virtual Office Pro Review
Originally posted on VoIP & Gadgets Blog, here: http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/voip/8x8-virtual-office-pro-review.asp.
8x8 sent me a trial account of 8x8 Virtual Office Pro to review. What is Virtual Office Pro? Think of it as your web-based communications portal handling phone calls (auto-attendant, VoIP), internet fax, hosted conferencing and hosted application sharing. The only missing piece from the equation is email, however it does support direct integration with Exchange Server by leveraging Outlook Anywhere to pull in your Outlook Contacts. You can also pull your corporate directory into the online communications portal.
The service gives you one direct inward dial number (DID) for inbound calls and an additional DID for the powerful hosted conferencing service which supports both audio and video conferencing as well as your typical conferencing features (chat, moderator, mute, etc.). It leverages Java and Flash for the user interface, collaboration, and the VoIP and video conferencing features.
Creating an Online Meeting
I really liked how I was able to drag-and-drop contacts into my online meeting. Makes it very easy to create meetings. You can also manually type email addresses and they'll receive the invite. I like the auto-complete within the fields which matches with your contacts. You have several options available when creating an online meeting. You can for instance request a response (RSVP) for your scheduled meeting. Other options include choosing the start/end date/time, the time zone, as well as enable/disable: chat, require moderator, mute all participants, audio recording, video, presentation sharing, Remote Desktop Control, and more as seen here:
Joining the Meeting
Once you receive the email invite, you can click the link and join the meeting from your PC. For audio you have the choice of using VoIP from your PC or by dialing into the conference and entering the meeting ID - information provided by the invite email.
VoIP / Video Quality
The voice quality was very good. Even though I've tested other Adobe Flash VoIP products, still pretty amazing to be talking over a browser using Flash components. The latency was minimal, so no complaints there. I tested two-way video in a meeting and it performed very well. You can do more than a two-way video conference call of course. There is no real limit to the number of video participants. The video participants will scroll to the right in the filmstrip as you continue to add more. Here's a screenshot of 8x8 doing a video conference demo with 3 participants:
As moderator when you mute their audio it mutes/turns off their web video as well. Meeting participants can make a particular participant's video larger or maximize a particular participant. Overall, the video conferencing capabilities were pretty good.
Collaboration
Once in the meeting you can chat with other participants. It worked as expected and even includes emoticons. For presentation sharing, it supports two modes of desktop sharing. You can choose Desktop Sharing which allows you to draw a box around an area of your PC's screen that you want to share. You can also move or resize this box at any time. Being able to share a specific section of your screen is a nice feature. Alternatively, you can choose Window Sharing to pick a specific Window application to share. The moderator can also grant application sharing permission to any of the participants so they can share their PC's screen.
The moderator can place participants into aprivate group and this is announced to them that they've been placed into a private group. This is useful for instance in sales calls when a sales person may need to get his manager's approval for a proposed reduction in price.
One nice feature is that you can have open-ended meetings with no end date. So if you end a meeting, you can quickly restart the meeting with all the various options already pre-configured without having to recreate it. This also holds true for scheduled meetings which do have an end date but hasn't expired yet. So if for whatever reason your PC or browser crashes, you can rejoin the meeting. As long as the option 'Require Moderator' is unchecked, all the other participants can continue to hold the meeting until you rejoin.
I liked the usability of the web interface a lot, especially the way windows would pop into the background (with thumbnail previews) when you view another option or setting. Then you simply click the red X icon and the window you were working on pops back to the foreground. Mind you, this is all within a single browser window/tab! Check out this example where I have 3 windows cascaded into the background:
It's important to mention that Virtual Office Pro supports two modes of recording - prompted or unprompted option. The unprompted option basically records all meetings and prompted requires user action to initiate a recording.Continue reading 8x8 Virtual Office Pro Review...
Tags: 8x8, collaboration, communications, conferencing, flash, hosted, internet faxing, review, video conference, virtual office pro, voip
Related tags: virtual office, online meeting, video conferencing, conferencing features, video participants, meeting
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