Web Conferencing Goes Open SourceWeb Conferencing Goes Open Source

A few years ago, I put together a long article reviewing all of the major Web conferencing tools. It did not include any open-source options for a very simple reason: There weren't any. Today, however, it's a very different story.Dimdim opened for business last September, providing what it billed as "the world's first browser-based Web meeting software. Here is how the company describes its technology in a nutshell:

Dimdim offers a hosted version of its Web conferencing software in three configurations. Its free basic package supports meetings with up to 20 attendees and includes most of the features you'll get from competing services. For $99 a year, the company's Pro service allows meetings with up to 100 attendees and adds, among other things, the ability to customize its Web meeting services. Dimdim also offers an enterprise-class version of its hosted service in both hosted and on-site configurations.

How does Dimdim stack up to its competitors? While I obviously can't speak for the company's ability to scale its services for enterprise customers, I can say that its basic Web conferencing services are extremely competitive, both in terms of the features it offers and the quality of its multimedia conferencing tools. And while "free" is always a compelling price, the company's most interesting offering is actually its "Pro" edition, which provides a solid package of conferencing features, technical support, and service-level guarantees -- all at a price that blows away many of its competitors.

Most companies that use Dimdim's hosted services won't necessarily care about the fact that the company's software is available, completely free of charge, in an open-source, GPL-licensed Community Edition. For developers and organizations willing to handle their own service and support needs, however, Dimdim's open-source offering basically duplicates the functionality of the company's enterprise-class software; while Dimdim's commercial offering includes some proprietary software components, however (including,.most notably, Adobe's Flash Server), the open-source version substitutes a set of comparable, but completely open-source, technologies.

Besides its open-source offering, Dimdim stands out in one other key respect: Its use of a completely browser-based Web conferencing client. Today, this approach to Web conferencing technology is still very much the exception. Given the obvious advantages of this approach, however, I don't think it will stay that way for very long.