Remote Conferencing with Yugma

Have you ever hastily slapped together a PowerPoint demonstration and felt like you needed some good solid feedback on your spur-of-the-moment masterpiece before you head off to show to a client or whomever might be the informee to your slideshow? Now, what if you were remote, and didn???t have a confidant nearby to say yea or nay? That might leave your confidence in question before that critical proposal, no? Yes, it might. Well, it just so happens that a few enterprising folks behind the conferencing utility known as Yugma thought of very similar potential dillemmas, apparently, because what they???re offering is a solution that rid you and your team or circle of worry. For free. Champagne anyone?

Well, forget the champagne, actually. (I???m more an acolyte of revered Belgian and Bavarian brews, myself.) Yugma is no miracle. Neither is the iPod, or the Ferrari 599. They???re all fantastic, but the praise each has received has naught to do with processional prayer or fairy dust. It???s got to do with having a mission and sticking to it.

Yugma adheres to that principle rather well, and with nice touches like cross-platform communication and compatibility between Windows and Mac OS X users, no one will be left high and dry. Except, of course, Linux. (Yugma states that Linux compatibility is ???coming soon???) I feel for you Tux, I really do.

All operations of Yugma are built around its collaboration utility. Conference calls are what it???s best at, but that???s just a surface feature which one would eventually take for granted. More interesting is its remote desktop-like options, where the presenter of, say, a PowerPoint file, can enable a virtual roundtable of colleagues in session the ability to view - and even alter - an item. Yugma is essentially free, but you???d assume that with a nearly costless product, your powers would be limited to ???show and tell???. Fortunately, participants aren???t beholden to only ???watch??? what goes on. Collaborators can allow others to overtake their own keyboard and mouse functions if the need should arise, and you don???t need to end a session change roles and regroup. Possibilities, possibilities, possibilities.

Also, for those in a workgroup not near a computer, the availability of a phone number allows one the option to call in, and even participate in the discussion (not like Talkshoe, where login information is necessary to contribute to a conference call). Don???t expect to bypass long-distance calling charges, however. Those may apply, depending on location. If saving a session should be deemed necessary, perhaps to share later with a vacationing boss, the option to do so is available, but it???ll cost you (at least US$10.)

Which leads us to the fine print. Well, not so much the fine print as the payment plans they have for groups to choose from. I did mention profusely about Yugma???s ???free??? spirit, but if you want everything the software is capable of outputting to you and your colleagues, you???ll need to pay a per-month charge. The rule for how much cash you???ll be relinquishing every 30 days is simple enough: more users, higher cost.

At US$10 you get the four basic Yugma services (???desktop sharing???, ???annotation tools???, ???change presenter???, and ???widget???), but also included is the ability to share mouse and keyboard controls, schedule sessions, session recording, 100MB of file storage, and customer service via the web or over the phone. You can also choose to pony up $100 for a year of ???Premium 10???.

???Premium 20??? and ???Premium 50??? are both exactly the same ???10???, the only advantage being the option to include more users in a session. Premium 20 will cost you US$30 per month, or $300 per year. Premium 50 is $100 per month, or $1000 per year.

You can have an unlimited number of sessions, regardless of whether you pay for Yugma or stick with the free stuff. The choice is good both for you and the folks behind Yugma, because it gives you the chance to try the service without time constrictions, and more adopters means more potential for Yugma to make money off of upgraders. If they chose to shut out all non-paying users, there would certainly be potential for another market force to undercut their business. The current model allows them to cover the largest share possible and garner a larger paid subscriber base too.

And, hey, how about this for a final kick? Very often a company walks into the limelight with a quirky name with no story. Yugma thus put its own nugget of trivia to explain its own title. Turns out the term is Sanskrit for ???the state of being in unified collaboration???. What better fitting a title?