TechJolt

Thanks to a post over at Lifehacker, I found a service that offers Webex-like services for free.  Well, if you have 20 or fewer attendees, that is.  The post I linked to above will take you on a screenshot tour of the service if you’d like to get a feel for it.

The reason I wanted to post about this service is because so many companies these days are looking everywhere they can to cut costs.  For example, more and more I hear of companies thinking of migrating to Linux to free themselves from Microsoft’s costly licensing.  Other larger companies are going as far as cutting back their use of services such as conference calls and video conferencing.

Dimdim offers a great solution to the problem, for free.  Signup is totally free, and hosting the meetings are free, again as long as your attendee list is no larger than 20.

Now, here’s an even better solution.  If your IT team is top notch, Dimdim offers a community edition for free.  That is, you can host your own instance of Dimdim on your own servers.  According to Dimdim, the community edition has all the features of the enterprise edition (The one you pay for), it just isn’t commercially supported.  However, using this open source software and hosting it on your own servers provides the added advantage of hosting meetings as large as you like.  As long as you have the bandwidth to cover it, it’s a great option.

Sometimes I like to save the best for last.  The cool thing about Dimdim is that it is supported on all major platforms – Windows, Mac, and yes, even Linux.  The only problem appears that the Desktop Sharing plugin isn’t supported on Linux.  Hopefully that will be addressed in a (near) future release.