Disclaimer: I did not imagine this first. I only trimmed the article ... I am not pretending I wrote it.
I get newsletters from various industries (this is from eweek). The article is about a new service called DimDim a Free web Conferencing app built on Flash, It is in Beta and has limitations (especially compared to Operator11, ustream, etc). No two way interaction unless you count using the telephone, but there is a link to an open source page on Sourceforge It is Windows and Linux friendly (no Mac ...bastards). Anyway, thought it would interest youz guyz. <http://etech.eweek.com/content/web_technology/free_and_easy_web_conferencing.html?kc=EWKNLEND101207STR3> "...at Dimdim.com <http://www.dimdim.com/>, host and access basic Web conferences for free. Based on Flash, no extra plug-ins are required. The entire engine is open source and can be downloaded and run for free by any business..." Dimdim.com is a beta and has its fair share of limitations. "... It is possible to add custom logos to meetings and use specialized buttons for joining meetings. While attendees use standard Flash, presenters need to install a special plug-in..." The bugs: Inviting people: add their e-mails to a list, but adding people after creating a meeting, the people already on the list get another e-mail(s) inviting them to the meeting. Changing a meetings time: According to the author "Dimdim wouldn't let (him) start the meeting, saying it was still scheduled for the later time. ....ability to use audio and video. ....presentation, one person speaks and everyone else listens, "...if the intention is to have a back and forth audio meeting, then Dimdim wouldn't work as well, with much of the attendee discussions garbled or out-and-out unintelligible. For these types of meetings, a standard phone conference line used in conjunction with Dimdim would probably work better...." ****Must be a way to tweak the source code to allow something like the FlashMeeting. yeah?**** "...In its current beta state, Dimdim also lacks ... the important ability to record a Web conference meeting...." *** I could be mistaken, but I seem to remember that on my old Mac, a stream meeting would cache (as long as I set the cache in Firefox to a size large enough and teh meeting was not real long. I did see someone mention here a stream recorder *** "... while a free hosted version will remain, a for-purchase enterprise version will also become available that includes all of the support and advanced features needed for enterprise-class conferencing...." "...The open-source version is currently in alpha but has some interesting aspects to it, including an integration tool kit and prebuilt integrations into other products such as SugarCRM..." For Information on the open-source version of Dimdim. <http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=176809> There may be other/better things that are Open Source, just thought I'd share what came my way.
