Custom Installers looking to offer service contracts will soon be able to offer face-to-face video sessions with their customers via a new Citrix service called HD Faces.Talk about high-tech simplicity. Citrix Australia yesterday offered to demonstrate to CDN its new HDFaces “telepresence for everyone” videoconferencing system with a face-to-face video session between CDN managing editor, David Frith, and Citrix Online country manager, Seamus King.
But when a promised well-equipped loaner laptop failed to arrive at our home/office by the arranged hour we were a trifle concerned. No worries, as it turned out – “If you have a PC or Mac with a webcam just keep an eye on your e-mail,” advised Howorth PR’s Dorea Lau.
And at the appointed hour, an e-mail invitation to join a “GoToMeeting” bobbed up on our iMac. We clicked on it – and like magic found ourselves in a telepresence environment, with three panels across the 27-inch iMac screen: chatting to Seamus King in one panel, the lovely Dorea in another, and viewing ourselves in the third.
We were able to chat, work collaboratively on a Word document – Word for Windows at Seamus’s end, Mac Word at ours – view Web documents and more. Pretty good audio, too, via choice of a headset or Telstra handset – and all without Citrix installing any software or connecting any hardware to our Mac. Pure magic.
HDFaces is currently in beta format, but free to try from www.gotomeeting.com. It will go live in July and Seamus King expects it to be a hit with SMEs, medical offices wanting to trade pictures and documents, club and association members spread by distance, and many more. Max number of telepresenced windows is six.
What’s it going to cost? Zilch, says King, as long as you’re a GoToMeeting subscriber, which costs $49 a month.
Citrix claims there’s nothing like it on the market. There’s Skype of course, but that’s pretty basic and set-up can be dodgy; and Apple has its Facetime – but that works only Mac-to-Mac, and neither has the professional collaboration tools available to GoToMeeting subscribers, or the stunning telepresence experience.
