In today’s business world it’s not realistic to have face-to-face meetings with all the participants in one place. Web conferencing enables you to conduct online meetings over the internet. But most of the web conferencing tools are very pricey.

Here I review Dimdim free open source online web conferencing software that can help you to conduct quality web meetings. The basic version that comes as a free software allows you to add up to 20 participants for your meeting.

Installation:

This is the best part of the software that there is nothing to install! The whole application is browser based. You can share your desktop, presentations, webcam or white screen from anywhere just over a mouse click.

If you are organizing the meeting, then register with Dimdim and login to schedule the conference. You can invite your participants as you schedule your meeting. The other person does not need to have a Dimdim account to conference in to the meeting. They just need to go to dimdim.com and click the ‘join meeting’ button. By providing your user id or room number, they can readily enter into the meeting.

Your webcam and mic will be very well supported by the software for online sharing and it has a very easy to use interface. Passing controls to another participant is also possible. Below is the screen shot of a presentation that I took from the participant's computer. With the paid version of the software you can also record your session.

Features:

·         Online web meeting

·         Screen sharing

·         Document sharing

·         Multi-paged white board demonstration

·         Web page sharing

Conclusion:

Except from a strange name, Dimdim is a wonderful piece of software to meet your small web conferencing needs. Even though security is not that good, it still is adequate for most purposes.

For large business purpose, you may find it good to go with the paid version as its way cheaper than other commercial web conferencing software such as Webex. But the video quality is not that good and you may find it slow too.

 Overall, Dimdim is a great option to go with. And I think the open and free nature of this software is noteworthy to mention.