Does GoToMeeting Cost Too Much?

A month ago, I would have argued that for small groups or infrequent use for meetings among peers would not warrant the purchase of GoToMeeting. A combination of teleconferencing and tools that nearly everyone already has like Netmeeting would be sufficient. For large meetings, meetings with VIP's or meetings with important clients I would have said that it was the best at the best price however, I still didn't like the fact that it required a phone conference in addition to the online meeting.

Now it has all changed. A very good product has become a great product. GoToMeeting made some changes early in July that address its shortcomings head on.

First, and this makes my graphics and design department ecstatic, they have added full support for Apple Macintosh. Now Mac users can organize meetings with the same ease as Windows users.

Secondly, they added VOiP. This eliminates the need for a second phone conference being used as long as the participants have microphones and speakers on their PC's or laptops. It is very easy to use and does not require any technical knowledge to implement. With these new additions to the product while keeping its price below $50 a month is incredible. It is a tiny tiny fraction of the cost of our old conferencing system. Now we can put together a meeting and have everyone together and comfortable at their own workstations in under half an hour.

There is nothing out there that comes close for the price.

It started with my downloading the free trial. To download it, I had to enter some basic information but then it asked for my credit card info. I wasn’t really ready to commit to my choice that deeply so I balked. I immediately received an email from GoToMeeting (I entered my email before it asked for the credit card) offering me a free trial that does not require a credit card. I proceeded to go through the process of downloading and installing the software. It was quick and easy. The software installed an icon in my systray on my PC.

Clicking on the icon revealed a menu from which I selected “Schedule a Meeting” I was presented with a straight forward selection of options and entries to make. In order to talk to each other during a GoToMeeting meeting, you need to use a telephone and set up a conference call. GoToMeeting provides this for you but we already have a service that we use for conference calling and I was able to enter our service’s information to be used instead of using GoToMeeting’s conference call system. Then I clicked SCHEDULE and the meeting was scheduled including putting a meeting reminder in my Outlook calendar (which I like).

Next, to invite people to my meeting, I clicked on the icon in my systray again and chose “My Meetings”. In the screen that opened I was able to select the meeting I scheduled and click the INVITE button. A nice pre-typed email message popped up and all I had to do was edit the Subject and enter the addresses of three people that I wanted to test this with. Then I sent the email.

When it was time for the meeting to start, I started the phone teleconference then I clicked on the icon in my systray again and chose “My Meetings”. This time I selected my meeting and clicked the START button. A real clean interface of controls showed up on the right side of my monitor and I saw that my three attendees were already there. They did not have any problems joining the meeting through their web browser.

It was very easy to switch between attendees desktops and make different people the presenter. Now we use it regularly.

We purchased the basic GoToMeeting product since it fulfills are needs and it is less than $50 per month.

You can try the free trial here.