Webinar Wire

A Brief Look at omNovia

Today I completed my free trial of omNovia, a Flash based webinar platform. Here's the good, the bad and the ugly (well really no ugly) from what I experienced.

Before my trial, I had an enjoyable session with an omNovia technician who showed me the ins and outs of the system. What first peaked my interested in omNovia was its screen sharing capability. I attended an omNovia hosted webinar a few weeks ago and was surprised at the quality of the application sharing. During my meeting with the technician, he shared with me that application sharing was how omNovia got its start. Clients in the financial sector who needed to screen share in a dynamic environment were omNovia's first customers and that is why the initial development effort was devoted to excellent screen sharing. The effort clearly paid off.

Pros:
The interface for the webinar producer is relatively straight forward. At first glance, you wonder, "where are all my controls?" but the Tools pop-up at the bottom of the screen reveals some of what you might have been looking for, such as polling and webinar recording.

The responsiveness of the system is impressive. I used a laptop as the producer's PC and an adjacent PC for an "audience" member and found network latency to be minimal.

The system handles PowerPoint slide decks brilliantly. I uploaded a complex PowerPoint presentation full of intricate transitions and animations. Every single one was reproduced flawlessly by omNovia.

My test of application sharing duplicated the results I had seen on a webinar weeks earlier. The audience member sees "smooth" cursor movement as the presenter navigates around the screen that he is sharing.

What might appear to be a gimmick to some, was quite a treat to me. omNovia has what they call the e-Curtain. One of the things I like about GoToWebinar is the way they simulate a radio experience by giving you control of when you actually start broadcasting. This way you can do some prep and even talk to co-presenters and panelists before your audience sees anything. omNovia implements this feature using a Broadway theater paradigm. As presenter/producer you enable the e-Curtain which then displays a red curtain to your audience such as you would see at the theater. Once you're ready to start broadcasting, you disable the curtain. You, the presenter, then see a short countdown to broadcast so you know exactly when your audience is seeing what you are displaying.

omNovia has a unique recording paradigm called the "Re-cast". Using re-cast, you not only record the webinar and all of its interactions, but you allow folks watching the replay to participate in the webinar asynchronously. Someone watching a recording of your omNovia webinar can type in the chat box and participate in polls. Text chat messages can be reviewed later by the webinar producer (although they are presented in a hard to read format). I found no way for the webinar producer to determine poll results collected during replays.

Cons:
I need to preface this section by saying that I am reviewing a free trial and I devoted hours, not days, to my examination. Some of my findings are clearly my opinion (a matter of taste) and some may frankly be due to "user error". I welcome a representative from omNovia or any current omNovia users to correct me where I have fallen short.

When one looks at omNovia's back-end administration it is clear that this is a technology company more concerned with technical excellence and less concerned with an intuitive administrative experience. I found the administrative menus not entirely obvious. I found reporting options in different locations. I found that certain parts of the administrative interface could only be exited by using the "back button" on my browser rather than having controls within the particular admin web page.

Setting up an event was fairly easy but still a bit clumsy. You are taken through a step by step process where you define the parameters of your webinar (date, time, duration, subject, etc.) and are then presented with an invitation page that displays the invitation text you should send to prospective registrants. One problem is that this page is empty until you click "save" on your initial parameters list. I was also very surprised to see that the teleconference number that comes with your account is not inserted into the invitation note. You have to go find it and manually type that in. Once you have finished setting up the event, the system emails you the sample invitation note that you can then send to prospects. You are also given the option to copy and paste the invitation from within omNovia into your email system.

The event setup also allows for the creation of follow-up reminder emails (which I did not test) as well as an after-webinar followup. I did test the after-webinar followup and was disappointed to find that it was not sent out automatically to all attendees. I'm guessing this needs to be done manually.

Finally, I could not see a way to change my default time zone so I was locked into scheduling my webinar on Central Time (when I live in CT). I didn't notice this during my first test and as an attendee I showed up to the webinar an hour early. 

On the technical side, I had a few complaints. You must manually flip a switch to enable audio. I found to my dismay that when I enabled my web cam (with built in mike), this was not enough. I recorded the webinar and when I played back the re-cast I was greeted by the sound of silence, and I ain't talking the Simon and Garfunkel hit either. I had forgotten to activate my mic. I would prefer that presenters/producers default to an open mic because forgetting to enable it can cause some embarrassment.

On another audio topic, I was not able to test the i-bridge, omNovia's method of integrating phone into the webinar ip stream. This was disabled in the trial so I cannot comment on its effectiveness.

While application sharing was very high quality, as I indicated earlier, I noticed one disturbing issue. The omNovia "projector" is able to share your entire desktop, a region of your desktop or a specific application. I chose to share a specific application but unfortunately if my cursor was not focused on that application, omNovia went right ahead and showed the audience member other parts of my screen that were in focus in the same "region" as the application I wanted to share. Therefore I think a safe rule of thumb when screen sharing, whether with omNovia or any other product, is to only enable applications you don't mind someone else seeing.

When it came to polling, I was a bit concerned with the amount of flexibility the audience member had. I started a poll and then as an audience member I answered the polling question and then dismissed the polling window. When the presenter was ready to share poll results, the audience member had already dismissed the window and could not see the results. I would have preferred if the polling window was completely controlled by the presenter and the audience member did not have the option to dismiss the polling window. Also as I stated earlier, when polls are taken by re-cast viewers, their answers do not get recorded for later viewing by the presenter.

I was a bit confused about the purpose of omNovia's "omni-tweet" feature but it did indeed post a tweet to my Twitter account when I tried it. I think this just comes down to figuring out an imaginative way to use the feature.

Your mom and pop functions such as white board and chat worked perfectly fine. There are a number of set up features within the product that I did not get a chance to test. 

The pricing of the product looked competitive but I was disappointed to find no pay-per-use option that is available with many other webinar products. There are some people who do webinars so seldom that paying a monthly or annual fee is simply a waste of money. Pay-per-use is the answer for them and hopefully omNovia will find a way to incorporate that pricing scheme sometime down the line.

Finally, if you are a MAC user, you are out of luck as an omNovia presenter. You can attend a webinar from a MAC but you cannot run one.


Summary:


Overall, I was pleased with the performance of omNovia. It has the advantages of Flash, like Adobe Connect but a bit simpler presentation interface. Its ability to display intricate PowerPoint slides was superlative and it handled screen sharing and video broadcast admirably. It is definitely a platform that you should consider as you embark on the adventure of giving webinars!