No need to invite your participants individually through e-mail or provide them with meeting key anymore. No need for the participants to visit the Zoho Meeting webpage too. All you have to do is paste a few lines of HTML code of Zoho Online Meeting in your own website or blog (we will see this in detail a little later). Your participants have to visit your website and join your meeting. It's that simple!
Embed Meeting feature will be very useful for the trainers who need to conduct e-learning programs and for sales person who need to conduct product demo. With this feature, you can allow your participants to join the meeting easily from their favorite browsers. You can greatly save your time and money and reach more people.
We have embedded and started Zoho Meeting in a webpage of ours. You can join the online meeting and see real time desktop sharing.
Advantages of embedding your meeting are:
Now, let us see how this feature works.
You have to first create online meeting to embed in website. It is not necessary to start the meeting.
'Meeting Details' page will open once you have created the meeting. Locate and click on the Embed meeting link in this page. A small window appears with a HTML code. Copy the generated code.
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Paste the copied code in your website. All your participants have to do is just visit your webpage, submit their names, and click join. They will be able to see your presentation once you start your meeting.
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For advanced features, join the Live Demo from here. For a detailed explanation, please visit our Help Page.
Try to embed Zoho online meeting in your website and Contact Us to let us know your feedback. We will be happy to hear from you.
If you want to provide demo or sales presentations quickly and want to save time in visiting the webpage then we have a solution to your need - Desktop Plugin of Zoho Meeting.
Also, if you are a customer support person conducting frequent meetings or remote sessions, you can use the desktop plugin and save time. You can resume your previously conducted sessions without entering the meeting key.
We have created the plugin with most of the features available in the Zoho Meeting website. With desktop plugin, you can Create online meeting/remote session, Join online meeting/remote session, Resume meetings and View My Meetings.
Let us see the benefits of desktop plugin.
Now, to download the Desktop Plugin (for windows), click here
Click Create Meeting button from Home tab. Provide details as given below in the Meeting details page.
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Now, Create the meeting and then start it at the scheduled time.
You can resume last conducted online meeting or remote session from the Home tab. Also, you can join existing meeting by providing the meeting key from Home tab. Participants can join using Flash/Java Viewer without any installation.
You can experience how the Flash/Java Viewer works by attending the LIVE DEMO. You can join the meeting as a participant with the Flash or Java Viewer and see one of our office computer desktop setup as a presenter.
Also, here you have an option to join to remote session by using session id.
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Try this feature and provide us with your valuable feedback, which will help us to improve.
For a detailed description, visit our Help page
Note: This feature is optional (not mandatory) for the participants
Did you know that you can remotely access your home PC using Zoho Meeting? Apart from using Zoho Meeting for Web Conferencing and Remote Assistance, you can use it to access your home PC remotely using just the browser. Here is how to do this...
Setup:
To get started, login to Zoho Meeting from your home PC and Create a Meeting. Give it a name - like 'My Home PC', change the 'Control Transfer' option to 'Auto' at the bottom and create the meeting.
Once the meeting is created, start the meeting. It'll prompt you to install an Active-X control. Once installed, you'll notice a 'Meeting Started Successfully' dialog near the Zoho Meeting toolbar. The toolbar can be minimized to the tray. This completes the one-time setup process.
Accessing your PC:
To access your home PC remotely, login to your Zoho Meeting and select the 'My Meetings' tab on the top. Here you'll notice 'My Home PC' meeting (or whatever name you provided) started. Choose the 'Join Meeting' option. By default, you can choose our Flash client to access your remote PC which means there are no installations on the client side, however our Java/Active-X clients are faster for this particular case.
After you join the meeting, you'll see your home desktop. To control your home desktop, choose the 'Request Remote Control' option on the top. Thats it. You'll now be able to access your home desktop from work or while you are traveling. After you are done, you can simply exit the meeting on the client side. As long as you don't end the meeting, you'll be able to access your home desktop any time. The agent installed on your home PC doesn't use suck your bandwidth when not in use.
Now the important part - because you are the only one accessing your home PC, this is absolutely FREE.
Please note that you can only access Windows desktops currently. The client can be Windows/Mac/Linux.
Hope this little tip works. Do any of you use Zoho Meeting for this purpose?
Note: Zoho Meeting currently doesn't officially support this. This is a tip based on my usage and an upgrade could break this functionality as this is not officially supported by our Zoho Meeting team.
Many of you would have wanted to remotely assist your friends or parents over installing a software or setting right a configuration in their computer. And support personnel have the requirement of troubleshooting a problem in their customer's premises. While this was possible by tweaking Zoho Meeting's options (specifically, by setting the Presenter as the Customer/friend while creating a meeting), this wasn't very intuitive, and rightly so :) Hence, we came up with a 'Remote Assistance' feature in Zoho Meeting specifically for this purpose - providing remote support to your friends and customers.
To use this, go to http://meeting.zoho.com and click on the Remote Assistance tab. You will see 2 options - Start and Join. Enter the email address of the person whose desktop you want to see (person whom you want to provide Remote support/assistance to), and click Start. You should see a screen like this :
And you should see a viewer opening in your PC, which will wait for the Presenter (person on the other side) to join the session. An email will be sent to the person to join the session. Otherwise, you can ask them to go to http://zohom.com (short form for Zoho Meeting :) ) over phone or IM and enter the 9 digit Session Id (that you'll see on the web page) to join your session.
Once the person joins the session, you should be able to see his/her desktop. Now, if you want to 'take control' of the PC and debug/trouble shoot issues, you can press the Request Control button in your toolbar, and you will gain control of the PC automatically! This should hopefully help you provide Remote Assistance in a few clicks!
Do give Remote Assistance a spin and let us know your thoughts and comments. In case of issues/queries our id is support (at) zohomeeting (dot) com or srk (at) zoho (dot) com.
Michael Hayslip has a great post explaining online meetings & how desktops can be shared easily. From his post,
An online meeting can be defined as a session where you and at least one other person are collaborating on a project in real time via your computers. ... An online meeting has the benefits of a face-to-face meeting without having to be in the same place.
And Michael explains how Zoho Meeting helps you do the above for free.
With Zoho Meeting, only the meeting host needs to sign up for an account. Others do not need an account in order to join an existing meeting. Once you sign up for a free account, you can begin hosting meetings. It is a very simple process and only takes a minute or two to get started.
For now, the free version of Zoho Meeting is able to handle my meeting needs pretty well. Currently, there is no limit to the number of meetings you can hold or participate in, or the number of participants that can be in a single meeting. ... Zoho Meeting works well behind a firewall and uses SSL encryption for security.
Mike Muise has this to say to his readers about free CRM,
Zoho CRM is a free customer relationship management suite (up to 3 users). If you require more users, there are paid options. I have been trying it for my day-to-day tracking of prospects and sales opportunities for 2008. The interface is clean, simple, but best of all it is fast. Something that not all CRM solutions can boast. It also runs cleanly in my browser, Firefox (take note other CRM providers!). As far as what I have used it for so far, I give it a big thumbs up.
Thanks to both the Mikes for the their nice blog posts!
A lot many new features have gone in to Zoho Meeting since its Beta launch. A few of them below.
Skype Integration
We have added the ability to do Skype conferencing in Zoho Meeting. This allows you to converse with your participants.
When you click on Create Meeting, there is a 'Skype' checkbox (beside the Presenter's section). Enabling it will get you a new column. Just enter the Skype ids of people whom you want to include in the conference.
You can also decide when you want to start the Skype conferencing. After you create a Meeting, you will get a button, Skype Conference.
On clicking that, users will be automatically dialed on Skype and included in the conferencing system!
Buddy List Auto Fill
Zoho Meeting also remembers the names/email addresses of the participants you have recently invited. When you type in the first few letters, there is an auto-fill/suggest box which helps fill the names easily.
Inviting Users to your Meeting Session
One feedback we receive quite often is, 'How do I invite users to a meeting?'. There are multiple ways you can invite people to a Zoho Meeting session, at various stages of the meeting session.
1) When creating a meeting, you can specify their email addresses in 'Participants' section
2) After creating a Meeting, there is an link to 'Invite' people. Clicking on that will give you multiple ways to invite people - standard Zoho Meeting invitation through email, sending a link using your Mail Client or IM, or using the Meeting Key to join
3) After installing the Agent/Presenter, there is an invite icon in the toolbar. Clicking on it will enable you invite people, giving their mail id.
For comments or suggestions, my id is srk(at)zoho(dot)com
Do give Zoho Meeting a shot and let us know what you think!
While Zoho Creator was the first Zoho app to have an exclusive blog dedicated to it, Zoho Sheet became the first to have a complete help book made for it. Check out the book at devGuide.net. Many thanks to Jacek Artymiak!
Lynn Aleshire of Anchorage, Alaska has been using Zoho Projects to help her daughter with her school work. And this got referenced in an article titled "Checking the Kids' Homework Over the Internet" by Christopher Lawton at the Wall Street Journal as well.
Richard MacManus at ReadWriteWeb is having a series of posts on Web Office this week and this post has a poll on word processors. Vote for Zoho Writer if it is your favorite.
At Bootstrappr, Jessica Hupp in a post titled "The Green Entrepreneur’s Toolbox: 100 Networking Resources, Guides, and Links", lists Zoho as one of the green tools that entrepreneurs can use for a paperless office.
Zoho Office Suite: The Zoho Office Suite has lots of great tools, but the greenest one is Zoho Meeting. You can use this tool to share desktops, hold online meetings and more, reducing the need to travel for collaboration.
We got a tremendous response for Zoho Writer moving offline using Google Gears. Blog search results in Ask (our favorite as it gets the most comprehensive results!), Technorati and Google. Thanks to all bloggers and analysts who wrote about this interesting development!
Now that it's been a week since we launched Zoho Creator 2.0, it's time for another announcement. Today we are opening Zoho Meeting to public.
We announced Zoho Meeting in March and it was in Private Beta till now. Today it steps out as a Public Beta where anyone with a Zoho Account can use Meeting. The application is free while it is in Beta.
For those of you who are not very familiar with Zoho Meeting, it is a web conferencing application where you can schedule meetings with others and share your desktop. Apart from sharing your desktop, sharing a presentation is an important part. For this reason, we integrated Zoho Meeting with Zoho Show (our presentation application) where a desktop sharing session can be embedded inside a slide. Zoho Meeting is also integrated with Zoho Chat.
One of the advantages of Zoho Meeting is that the attendees can be on any operating system to attend a meeting. Here are some quick highlights of Zoho Meeting.
Here is a quick video of the application.
Try Zoho Meeting out and we would love to hear your valuable feedback comments.
Gili at 'Blogging for business' has a nice post titled "A realistic valuation model for blogging ventures" which is about calculating the net worth of a blog. The blog evaluation calculator there is on Zoho Sheet. If you have a regular blog, do give the blog evaluation calculator a try.
John Wilson confesses to being a big Zoho fan (thanks, John!) and has a nice post of his first experience with Zoho Meeting. From his blog post,
Today, whilst chatting to someone on Skype, I decided it would be helpful to walk them through a website application. I was able to quickly launch Zoho Meeting, ping them an email invite containing a link and within 2 minutes from initiating the entire process, my counterpart was able to view my onscreen activities without having to worry about installs on their machine.
Another long-time Zoho fan, Craig Cmehil has a full review on Zoho Meeting as well.
Talking of Zoho fans, here's a Chinese blogger named Wangtam who has got lots of posts involving Zoho! Benoit Descary (being French) took note of Zoho Sheet going multilingual.
And this is from a Tumbler blog, "can't believe I missed these brilliant applications" [referring to Zoho Projects and Zoho Creator]. The same blog makes a reference to one Mr James Clay who had referred to a list of Top 25 Web 2.0 tools for schools. Probably it is this article from March 2007 in OEDb (Online Education Database) which recommends many of the Zoho apps. Elmer Thomas Jr. writing about Office 2.0 tools recommends Zoho Projects & Zoho CRM as well.
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