I’ve been playing around with e-Touch meeting room from Onlinemeetingrooms.com for the past while. To put it bluntly… this product does exactly what it says on the tin.
- It is a meeting room
- It is online
- It just works
Recently an event I was involved in as a speaker had a problem. A speaker had a last minute problem travelling to the event. In conference land this is usually a crisis situation. The conference organiser called on me to see if I could do a second presentation at the conference, but was concerned as the speaker who was to travel had been ‘ticked’ as one they wanted to see by a lot of delegates. I would very much be a ‘surrogate band’ and people might not welcome the change in running order (particularly if they’d paid mainly to see that presentation).
Being a cheeky bugger I dropped a quick email to Joe Garde in Onlinemeetingrooms.com to see if he might be able to help. A few additional facts are important here. I emailed him around 18:30 on the Friday of a Bank Holiday weekend. The conference started on Monday in the UK. Monday was a Bank Holiday in Ireland (where Joe is based) and the speaker was due to present on Tuesday afternoon.
This left a window of Monday to sort something out that we could be confident would work.
Joe phoned me on Saturday morning and we discussed options (while I furiously texted the conference organiser in the UK to let him know what was happening). With Joe’s help a clear plan formed… we’d use the OnlineMeetingRoom system to video link the speaker into London from Dublin. Ideally we’d need a wired broadband connection, but Joe and I were confident we could make it work.
Over to London with me… Monday afternoon we did a test (24hrs before the presentation). Over the hotel’s wifi network. No wired broadband available…
Worked perfectly. No fuss or hassle, no installing equipment (I had a webcam in my bag and the roadies… sorry AV professionals took care of figuring out the hook-up to the PA). The roadies liked it so much they wanted to get in contact with Joe as they do a lot of conferences and seminars that it could add value to… I do hope they buy it.
Fast forward to the day of the presentation… room full of people, nervous conference organiser and conference chairperson… me very calm and confident because I knew we were using good kit that just works.
…Presenter comes on from Dublin, audio good, video good, presentation content good. Slide timings a little off because I was running the powerpoint in London to keep as much bandwidth for video and audio as possible and got distracted by how well things were going.
…everyone happy. Kudos for everyone all round.
Looking back, I could have done one or two presentational things better but the kit worked. That was the main thing.
I work in Telco and I’ve seen a fair share of ‘cutting edge’ tools that just don’t cut the mustard when the shit is hitting the fan. My experience with the e-touch Online Meeting room has always been excellent. When the chips were down the tool just worked. And Joe helped out co-ordinating on the Dublin end to make sure that the presentation went as smoothly as possible, which on a Bank Holiday was support above and beyond the call of duty.
It is so straightforward even my pointy-haired boss could use it…
Now that’s good kit that just works.
I’ll have to second that. I’ve spoken with Joe via OMR twice, having been invited to participate in two discussions around Limerick Open Coffee and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.
You’re absolutely right, it “just works”, working exceedingly well to boot with five of the six “rooms” in use from various locations around Ireland (cork, limerick, Kilkenny, two in Dublin). Plus you’ve got a real nice helpful guy in Joe behind it all as well. The very best of luck to all involved with OnlineMeetingRooms.com as they continue to develop.
Joe gave me a glimpse of the new meeting room due to be rolled out soon. It gives you additional functionality including the ability to stream your desktop. It really is an amazing application and it’s great to see more and more users reaching tipping point.
Paul/Ken
Thanks for visiting.
The desktop streaming is something I hope to get a chance to play with… but I’d rather play with things in a context that allows Joe and OMR some scope for kudos and a bit of good PR. London was a good example (hope to have photos of that soon).
I definitely think that there is a tipping point here… the problem with video conferencing solutions in the past was that to get acceptable quality you had to pay an unacceptable amount. Bog standard peer2peer services are fine for chatting with your cousin in Sydney but for professional applications you need a ‘grown up’ solution that works. The fact that the guys in OMR are continually improving the tool (desktop streaming etc.) is another excellent attribute.
I think that now that we have that tool at a price point that SMEs can stretch to we may get some traction on remote meetings etc. so people don’t have to travel unnecessarily.
I’m on the Board of Directors of an international Not-for-Profit (www.iaidq.org) and I’m pushing this as a way to deliver good member services, and I also have the dubious honour of livng in Wexford and working in Dublin.. my life would be a LOT easier if I could do meetings from home…
Delighted to see more kudos for Joe and team. I sat in on an online meeting in Limerick last week at OpenCoffee where Ken and Bernie Goldback were two of the participants and was very impressed with the quality.
Delighted also to have come across your blog Daragh. One tip – you might want to fix the autodiscovery settings for your feed. http://obriend.info/feed/atom isn’t working while http://obriend.info/feed/ is. Now subscribed 🙂
James
Thanks for the tip. I’ll shoot the coding pixies at dawn.
As for your experience with OMR.. glad you enjoyed it too. It is nice to come across products that are just good quality, well designed and scale well.
At this rate I may need to repurpose the blog to be the “Online Meeting Rooms Appreciation Society”. 😉