[tei-council] Webex-experience

[Lou]

I thought it might be helpful to others contemplating the use of webex 
to report on my experience with it.  Probably my rather negative 
reactions arise from unrealistic expectations/naivety on my part, rather 
than any serious defects in the product, but for what it's worth, I 
tried it out in earnest with a serious conference involving about 17 
people scattered around the world, and we had to abandon it after about 
10 minutes. That's not counting the hour or two I put in on other tests 
beforehand.

The executive summary: it does NOT work out of the box.

Here are some specific problems we encountered:

1. You have to install additional software in addition to your web 
client to connect to the conference. This can take a significant amount 
of time, depending on your client and your connexion, and (as was the 
case for one of our participants) it can be impossible if you don't have 
  sufficient privileges on the machine you're using. So for example you 
couldn't use webex from a teaching room machine, unless it has been 
previously configured with the webex client.

2. Some combinations of platform/browser Just Do Not Work. We had 
problems reported with Opera (any platform), Thunderbird (Mac OS), and 
there may be others.

3. The telephone access is very variable in quality. One of our 
participants (unfortunately the chair) could not use it because of the 
amount of background noise (and his network access was poor because of 
lowfi-wifi). Other telephone users were very loud or very quiet, or just 
suddenly dropped out.

4. I could not find any way of transmitting video using Ubuntu/Firefox 
(though I could receive it, and other applications could see my webcam)

5. Of our 17 participants, two needed to try several machines before 
they got a working installation; three got things working, but then 
found that they lost audio; two were unable to get satisfactory network 
connectivity (so their audio was too bursty to be comprehensible). 
Participants were located in the US, in Canada, and in various parts of 
Europe. They were all reasonably competent IT-skilled people.

If I were going to use it again (which I would like to because when it 
works it is very nice, as well as saving us money), I would invest time 
and effort beforehand in setting up a conversation with each of the 
participants in turn, to check that their local configuration was OK. We 
did that for some of our participants and those were the ones (mostly) 
for whom everything more or less worked. The mistake I made was probably 
to assume that because it was "just a web browser", everything would 
work straight off. It doesn't.