Kolab Meet beta – The story so far..
Earlier this year we wrote here on this blog about our new added feature: ‘Kolab Meet’ The voice & video conferencing tool. We explained how this tool was still in beta, but that all users of kolab Now (with full groupware subscriptions) could gain access to the tool, and how it was used.
Now it has been a while, and we have made a few updates to the tool. It is still in beta, but we have added features and fixed some defects and corrected some inconveniences. here are a few comments on experiences with the latest iteration of Kolab Meet (listed in no particular order):
| Ease of use |
As noted elsewhere on this blog, our plans for Kolab – and Kolab Now – are driven by the improvement of User Experience (UX). On that note, we have received a lot of feedback from users of the beta Kolab Meet, who praised us for the ease of use, and the transparency in the UX.
To make sure that you can make full use of the features in the tool, we wrote this knowledge base article to answer the most frequently asked questions about the functionalities. |
| Number of participants | The number of participants in an event depends on many factors, but letting participants join as Silent audience members (see the kb article), makes it possible to host more participants in the room during an event. We had events with 50+ Silent audience members with no problem.
For events with a number of active (non silent) participants above 15, things started to get muddy. Not because the of the technology, but because of 15 people wanting to talk at the same time. ;-). |
| Preparation for an event |
We experienced, that when something goes wrong, it has one of two causes:
Home internet connections today are often quite powerful, and have plenty of bandwidth for running an event in Kolab Meet. It is however often the connection between the actual client machine and the ISP ‘modem’ where things go wrong. Make sure to connect with a cable if possible, or check that the wifi connection in use really is powerful enough. Browsers need to be allowed to make use of the camera and the microphone. If this permission is not in place, then the connection to the event will fail, or other participants can not hear or see the user. In Firefox this permission is asked for at the opening of the event URL, or it can be set in ‘Preferences -> Privacy & Security -> Permissions’. Chromium has this setting at ‘Settings -> Privacy & Security -> Site Settings’. |
| Can others join my event without my knowledge? | A few users have asked this question. The answer is No! Take a look at the knowledge base article to see how you are in charge of who has access to your room. |
As mentioned, the Voice & Video tool is still in beta. This means, that support may not be able to assist you if you run into troubles with it. We are however eager to hear your feedback on the tool, as we use that to drive the direction of the final work and releases.