Mikogo: New screensharing app for the PC and Mac
at: 7:58 PM | Filed under: technology
I've been playing phone and email tag with a client for about 2 weeks now. I finished up a website for him recently and he wanted a little training on how to maintain his site, add files, that sort of thing. The ideal situation would have been to meet at a local coffee shop or something, but we're both busy guys with families. So I suggested the idea of screen sharing. Adobe offers Acrobat Connect, there's GoToMeeting, and loads more. But he's on a Mac and I'm on a PC which made it more difficult. I started looking around online and finally found one that looked promising...Mikogo.
The look of it is very playful and fun, but under the hood is some serious power. It offers screen sharing, the ability to switch presenters, pause, stop, and even record presentations, file transfers, meeting scheduling, whiteboard, and loads more. Best of all? It's cross platform, and FREE. Sign up is a breeze with only a few required fields. Set up is even easier...double click the downloadable and you're ready to start a meeting. Enter your login credentials and you're provided with a meeting ID. Mikogo even gives you handy buttons with which to email or IM meeting information to the person(s) of your choice.
I got on the phone with my client, and started a meeting. I read him the meeting ID and all of a sudden saw a growl style popup in the bottom right corner with an indication that he was in. All of a sudden he starts talking about how much he loves my desktop. We stayed on the phone and in the meeting for about an hour...the only issue was when I tried to send him a file via the app and it didn't work. Could be the Mac/PC difference? Email works just as well.
All in all I'd say that this is a solid product and I give major thumbs up to Mikogo for their efforts, and for helping me stay at home with my family, rather than meet a client and be out all night. High five guys!
Hi Andy, Thanks for blogging about your experience of Mikogo. Great to hear about our web conferencing tool assisting you and your client so easily and quickly. Yes, we just released the Mac Beta version a couple of weeks ago, so Mikogo is cross-platform. Details here: http://www.mikogo.com/mac/ At present the file transfer feature is not in the Mac Beta version. You can transfer files with another Mikogo user on a PC. We are working on new features for the Mac version, and will be releasing a new version soon. Thanks again for the shout-out :-) Cheers, Andrew Donnelly The Mikogo Team
FYI - Adobe Connect (which is free up to 3 users) is cross platform as well. I've used it a lot with Mac clients. All clients allow sharing of the screen. The thing I *really* like about Connect is users only need Flash to view a desktop, they only need the Connect plug-in if they want to share their desktop. Connect isn't perfect, but it's good alternative--especially when you just want to share your screen since the other user doesn't need any software installed.
I didn't realize that Connect was free Dan. Thanks for clarifying.