Today, at work I have been attending to a web conference meeting. The software use for that was IBM Sametime. The software, beside the common web conference functionalities (chat, audio, webcam ) has a functionality that permit people to view and to take control of other people screen and display what is being done so that every attendant could see it.

The use of that is quite obvious :

• Display a Presentation to every participant. The access security settings would be set to View Screen only
• Make a live tutorial with the possibility of helping and attendant by taking control of his screen ( the attendant has to share it first).

My first reflex was to search what exists in the open source world to do the same (I couldn’t find anything, please leave me a message if you can find something).

After this research, I have said to myself « I have already seen those functionalities somewhere ». VNC, Ekiga, OpenWengo, OpenMCU … Hum .. There must be some thing to do with that bunch of software.

Studying the functionalities

• Comparison

| IBM SameTime | Open source apps |
| Chat | Ekiga, IRC |
| Voice | Ekiga, Openwengo |
| {Video | Ekiga |
| Remote Desktop View | VNC, vino |
| Remote desktop control | VNC, vino |
| Conferencing server | Open MRU, OpenSER, IRC server|

• Existing Open Source solution
• http://www.dimdim.com : a solution that uses the browser to provide a web conferencing software . I put open source in quote cause I am not sure that the server side is open source.