WebEx Meeting Center Review

Meeting Center Review Summary – Over the last 10 years, WebEx has been the de facto choice for enterprise web conferencing software, while GoToMeeting has been the preferred choice for small business. Meeting Center has superseded MeetMeNow as Cisco’s online meeting product for small business.

Pros – Mobile clients allow you to participate and control meetings. Meeting Center has mobile apps for iOS, Android, and Blackberry.

Cons – Standard version has 50% less meeting capacity than GoToMeeting. You can’t share presentations from your mobile phone. The pricing is more complicated than it needs to be. The recording format is proprietary, and must be converted to other formats for playback.

WebEx Meeting Center Ratings

Category	Score	Why
Overall Rating:		WebEx Meeting Center is a good all-around online meeting solution. Usability, customer support, and reliability could use improvement.
Usability:		WebEx has one of the most feature-rich web conferencing applications we’ve. The trade-off is usability.
Audio quality:		WebEx has a dedicated audio network that improves the sound quality and reliability significantly.
Video quality:		The video conferencing feed looked good in our tests, but the desktop sharing looked pixelated.
Collaboration features:		WebEx Meeting Center’s collaboration features make it a good choice for team projects.
Presentation features:		We found the presentation controls both easy to use and powerful.
Mobile features:		WebEx Meeting Center is a leader in mobile with native apps for iPhone, Android, and Blackberry. The mobile app isn’t as powerful as the desktop, but it does an adequate job.

What We Like About WebEx Meeting Center

Meeting Center is mobile friendly – with clients for Blackberry, Android, iPad, and iPhone, WebEx is winning the mobile game. The only drawback is that you can’t use your mobile device to present. According to WebEx, this feature is in the works.

Screen Sharing – We like how the screen sharing application works. You can choose to share your entire desktop, a specific application, or a document/presentation. Screen sharing in meeting center is intuitive. There’s an indicator at the top of the screen that indicates what’s being shared. When you’re not in that application, your other applications have a gray transparent layer over them, indicating they’re not being shared.

User Experience - We like the new user interface – it’s a big improvement over the old MeetMeNow product.

What We Don’t Like About WebEx Meeting Center

You can’t present from a mobile device – You can setup and participate in meetings from a mobile device, but you can’t share presentations yet. WebEx says claims to be working on this.

The pricing needs to be simplified – You can get the starter version of WebEx Meeting Center for just $19/mo, but if you want more than 8 attendees, or need multiple hosts (e.g. more than one person in your company needs to do meetings) you will need to upgrade to the $49/mo version. Once you’re on the $49/version, you can add more hosts, but each additional host costs $49/mo. This can get expensive… even with a small sales staff.

The recording format is proprietary – The WebEx player is required to playback the recording. Unfortunately, this proprietary format requires you to install additional software. Furthermore, the recordings are not compressed. A short meeting, is unnecessarily large. For example, we did a 12 second meeting, and the recording weighed in at nearly 100k. Considering that most meetings last minutes (some last hours), we can only imagine how large the file size would be.

WebEx Meeting Center Features

Additional Resources

Before committing to an online meeting service, make sure you read the reviews for our top picks. You can also compare our top picks side by side. It’s worth noting, that most of the vendors we review on this site offer free trials.

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WebEx Meeting Center Review Details

Reviewed by: Jeremy Palmer
Reviewed on: November 2011