Tech U: The World Is Our Campus - Messaging & Collaboration - Network Computing (original) (raw)
Web conferencing software lets colleagues, students and researchers from all over the globe collaborate. We tested nine products and awarded our Editor's Choice to two: One for its hosted offerings; the other for its in-house applications.
Apr 7, 2006 - By Derrick L. Cogburn and Divya Kurup
Marratech 6.0 
Marratech 6.0 scored well on our features evaluation, boasting high-quality audio and video over IP. In fact, in our evaluations of audio and video quality, Marratech led the pack. We were especially pleased with the ability to have private conversations with other session attendees. Like Breeze and e/pop, Marratech offers multiparty video, but its was the most stable and robust. Plus it has a voice-activated option so that the person speaking the longest goes to the larger video window. Other video-enabled participants are shown in thumbnail images--more than sufficient for most collaboration purposes.
Like all of the in-house applications we tested, Marratech licenses its server software and provides client software for free. It also offers a Time-to-Meet hosted option and a Meet Now! service that lets participants enter a session from a Web browser, without downloading the Marratech client.
After an easy installation, Marratech Meeting led us to its management Web page, which is rudimentary. We used Marratech Manager 3.3 to set up meeting rooms and issue invitations. It was easy to start recording and to launch video and IP audio. Like e/pop, Marratech provides a full-screen video mode, and it was easy to load our content--for example, there was no need to do application sharing to see a PDF. However, as with Elluminate, our PowerPoint files first had to be converted to image files, and then loaded, but when viewed they were incredibly clear and could be marked up by presenters and participants.
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Marratech runs on Mac OS, Windows and Linux--only Elluminate offers more cross-platform functionality. Marratech also promises to run on most PCs without any need to upgrade performance capabilities; minimum specifications are Mac OS X 10.3 or higher using a G4 processor or higher, Linux or Microsoft Windows (Pentium III or above).
Some of the biggest limitations of Marratech come in its participant-interaction functionality. There is no discussion control and only limited differentiation between user roles. We would prefer not to have to determine roles of participants in advance.