SiliconGrassland.com

Something great happened today – DimDim 4.0 came out. It’s the WebEx killer, and the guys at DimDim are even bold enough to put “WebEx is history” on their frontpage.

This web conferencing application lives up to expectations, and more. For months I have been playing with WebEx, GoToMeeting, Yugma (ug), and some other apps. I just couldn’t stomach paying a lot of money (WebEx and GoToMeeting) or using a crappy application (Yugma) for doing sales-critical webinars at DataSync. I’ve used DimDim in the past, but it just wasn’t quite there yet. Version 4.0 changes that.

First, the latest version of this app supports Mac desktop sharing, a requirement for me to function. Second, DimDim is now all flash and doesn’t require any client-side java application to function. It’s about time. DimDim supports whiteboard and PDF sharing inline, a really nice feature to get your audience involved on collaborative projects.

Here’s a a partial feature list from DimDim’s site:

• Share & Present Documents (PPT/PDFs)
• Share Mac & PC Desktops
• Share Whiteboards
• Share Mics (Built in VoIP & teleconferencing)
• Share Webcams (Live video & audio)
• 2-Way Video Chat
• Recording and playback of meetings
• Multiple Presenters (Host lets others share)
• Public Chat (Instant Messaging)
• Annotations and Markup tools
• Scheduled Meetings
• eMail & Calendaring (Outlook integration)
• Localization
• CRM integration (SugarCRM)

We’ve already looked at adding this app to DataSync Suite, and it’s looking really promising. I do webinars all the time, and it’s great to finally have an application that is open source, user friendly, and does exactly what it’s designed to do.