I've been looking around for some time for a good online seminar solution for a client of mine that does online training. They have been using Webex for years and are somewhat fed up with the poor quality of service. They do several courses a year, some are simple one day 4 hours courses, others are several 6-8 hour sesions over 3 to 4 months. The presenters are never located at one single place at anytime, and neither are the attendess. Some courses only have 20-30 attendess, others have around 600. They want to be able to share videos (and be able to pause and point at certain areas of the video), power point presentations (with animations, and not by sharing a desktop because of the low resolution desktop sharing is), webcams of the presenters, allow the attendess to ask questions in writing, conduct polls, and optionally be able to embed the client for attendees into a browser. I can't find a software/service solution that encompasses all these requirements, uptime and stability are also extremely critical, so I turn to this forum to see if anyone here might know of a software/service solution that you can recommend. Pricing isn't an issue, so long as it delivers all of the above.

WebEx

Don't mean to be pithy, but I saw the thread title and immediately thought WebEx. They're painful as all hell to use but there really isn't much competition in this area.

And it's absolutely awful. My client has the 1000 attendee package, and after the first 500 attendees serious issues start to show up, such as random disconnects of attendees (as soon as another joins), when over 500 attendees, web cams no longer work (people start to doubt the event is actually live) and other problems. I'm wondering if the use of a more professional conferencing system that is broadcast to a highquality streaming service such as livestream or other would do the trick (integrating a chat box to the embedded page).

No real competition to Webex? Even if something is just catering to education services?

I guess that's not surprising since my friends and I (different schools) are forced to use Oracle's Blackboard crap.

Ugh, Blackboard sucked, thankfully I rarely had to use it.

Webex is also a pain in the ass, and AT&T's version (Connect? don't remember the name) is even worse.

If we're conferencing within the company, we've recently started using Lync. Still not perfect, and we haven't played around too much with external participants but I would gladly use Lync over Webex.

A thread about online seminars? Man, we officially have nothing to talk about

HAHA YEA

Sf_Gold, you should take this as a call to arms and create your own online seminar service. I'm sure it can't be that hard.

SF_GOLDG_01's MMORPG TOTAL CONVERSION ASTRO TURF 4.5D Online Seminar Software with TODOA plugins.

this

I've used "Adobe Connect" at work a few times (once as the presenter), and it appears to work well. Both that and WebEx can be pretty choppy, but that's probably more the network than anything.

However, if my client is so adamant that they want a better system, they probably will end up hiring me to develop an inhouse solution for them. I've already done a couple other things for them. In two weeks we're finishing a massive website that has a custom CMS, a custom minimalistic "moodle-like" platform, custom forums, custom job engine, etc... everything is custom on their site, we use a slightly modified version of bootstrap and a couple slightly modified widgets for the front end, we started in July and in January we've been putting all finished sections online. Now I have another client that wants a simple client information management system, all it does is CRUD operations with client data and purchase history, should be a quick job. I desperately need a vacation.

I wouldn't take that job.

I already hit bottom of the barrel when I wrote a 100% custom inhouse DRM solution that was completely wacko. It took pptx files and turned into something else that only our software could render, when connected to the online server, with a user account with auth privledges, and generated a special key that was a special instruction set for decyphering the files... of course this didn't stop people from taking pictures of the slides and making pdf files, but I don't have the luxury of choosing my jobs. Anyhow, they probably won't do it, not for a while, and if they do, I always do a good amount of consulting and put together a detailed development plan so as to know how things will come together. It won't be cheap.

That was an unqualified statement.

it's going to cost so many pesos

mucho dinero

heh, seminar

Gold, from what you've said, it sounds like WebEx has trouble reliably scaling. Wouldn't solving that problems involve a hell of a lot more engineering and server capacity than a single consultant can handle?

WebEx is a 3500-employee subsidiary of Cisco.

Surely he's worth more than 3500 employees who have spent years working on the product.

Scaling is really easy, all you have to do is buy metric buttloads of server capacity and pay ten, perhaps twenty times as much as you were paying WebEX, not including development time.

Worse, those 3500 people aren't doing R&D. They're doing operations. That's why I wouldn't take this job, because the long tail is maintenance and scalability. It's going to be annoying to negotiate a contract that explicitly defines a reasonable scope with reasonable expectations, and any follow-on work is going to be IT which gets billed at a lower rate than CSA/dev. Why bother?

Because that is not how I work with this client. Goals are set, but dates are not. I get paid a fixed monthly wage and show up in their offices on an agreed schedule. I have the the capacity of taking a week or two off (discounted of course) if I need to dedicate time to another project. I basically go in, work, deliver progress reports to their IT dept almost daily, and just go forward until it is finished. Then their IT dept. takes over and, an additional month is spent training and reviewing, and they maintain the project from that point onwards. Then we discuss the next project.

[CENTER] SF_GoldG_01 [/SIZE]
IT Specialist
"Delivering impossible solutions, whenever I have time."
[/CENTER]

You're an employee.

An employee potentially being tasked with a job doomed to fail. Good luck with that one.

Sort of... About 8 months out of every year. The other 4 I get to work full time with other clients. This client is my main client and most reliable, can't really say no to their projects. Yes I'm screwed. This next project is too big of an undertaking for me. But then again, we don't have the same needs as webex. Webex probably has tens thousands of people connected to different sessions during western business hours. I only need to come up with a system that allows acceptable quality audio streaming to no more than 1000 (realistically, no more than 800, max number we've ever had in an event, although very unstable), with a local synchronized copy of the current power point slide that the presenter is using. For the audio part, I've already looked into some VOIP libraries that can handle those quotas, as for the presenters webcam, I'll look into video streaming libraries or services next. In reality, it could be several independent systems/services that are all tied together into a browser embedded java app, running off a couple rented servers. The amount of money spent on the enterprise webex package is pretty high (I won't say how much, but it several times greater than renting a dedicated server, and the company would probably spend twice as much as what they are currently spending on webex, as long as it was a better quality service)

No, not sort of. The difference between employment and independent contracting depends on whether your relationship is contract-of-service or contract-for-service, respectively. This isn't a small semantic difference here. Most legal jurisdictions explicitly state the difference between employment and independent contracting for taxation, liability and labour rights reasons. It's very important that you understand how the law views your relationship with this company so you understand what your rights and responsibilities are. A lot of shadier employers like to establish on-paper independent contractor relationships with regular employees in order to dodge labour standards and certain expenses. Everything I've seen in this thread suggests this is exactly what this 'client' is doing to you. And since (let's be totally frank here) aren't a terribly smart guy, you probably just signed whatever contract they gave you to sign and maybe didn't even read it, so the longer you keep working for them the worse these pain points are going to get.

Here's a fun question: when customer info gets leaked out of your dip****ty homebrewed CMS, who's going to court? Your client, or you? Do you even know?

I am a professional software project manager. I'd have a lot to say about this but tbh I've already hit my lifetime limit for how much free work I'm willing to do for the Internet. Like I said above, I wouldn't take this job.

Your assumption that the CMS is unsafe simply because I designed it just that: an assumption. There is actually another third party contractor who looks for vulnerabilities, reports them, and I fix them, so yes, my responsibility in that area is off. Every precaution has been taking, from using only prepared statements, data sanitation, encrypted passwords that cannot be decrypted, proper ssl certificates, etc. you name it, it was put into the system. Besides, we don't store any form of credit card or bank information. As for me being employee, no again you are wrong. We essentially define a large list of all the functionality required of anything we develop, this is also in the contract. A monthly wage is decided upon. Once I deliver what is in the contract, it ends. Neither can terminate the other without paying a large penalization. Also upon completion, I receive a significant bonus to top things off. I am completely comfortable with this arrangement, and it suits all my needs. Can most independent contractors around the world say the same?

Anyhow, I'm done here, I have nothing further to add, especially when there is no way of making you change your mind, because you are hard set and predisposed to take the opposite side to my own. If my client decides to go forward with the aforementioned project, fine, I'll do it. maybe around 16 months later I'll be showing it off here, assuming massassi is even still around. If they don't, then it won't matter at all anyways.

Your CMS is insecure because all software systems are. Even if you've formally proven your system its validity is subject to the truth of your assumptions which, in our worst of all possible universes, are guaranteed to fall apart at some level if nothing else because of ****ing cosmic radiation. And quite frankly even if you have somehow stumbled across some perfect combination of much-tweeted-about "best practices" that really does grant you perfect security, the fact that you're clearly too inexperienced and unprofessional to manage your personal risks a priori makes me confident that you're not managing your project risks properly either.

And no, you're an employee. Consistently when there are laws that distinguish between employment and independent contracting, the most decisive factor is the period and manner of pay. Contractors are paid for delivering a work unit. Employees are paid for delivering their labour over a time. You are an employee.

Don't let the door hurt your butt more on the way out.

A static taint analysis is basically ****ing Step Number Zero on the road to even begin to be able to argue that your software is secure, and you probably have no damn clue what that even means.


As an actual software professional, people like you D.B.A. "the boss's neighbor who is really good at computers" are why I hate this ****ty god-forsaken industry.

Most independent contractors around the world can say "this work-for-hire is provided as-is; following a signed statement of receipt the contractor shall not be held liable for any use of this work, and the contracting party agrees to indemnify the contractor against any claims related to this work".

Can you, ****-dick?

"It's a pedestrian's responsibility to look both ways in a cross-walk, so it's not my fault if I hit one."

jfc I wish you were an actual troll because at least then I could congratulate you about being good at something

You know, something tells me that in the future, you will consider doing construction or something in the construction field as the new "career path du jour." I mean, why not? Construction attracts these types of people. Now, change "third party contractor" to "inspector," and I can see how things like this work out.

Please don't go into construction. Maybe 5, 10 and 15 years later, I bet you will be thinking about it. Like, how hard is it really to build something with these simple power tools and level???

Web development is stacked with people who think that because they somehow puzzled out how to translate between a database written by much smarter C programmers and a web server written by much smarter C programmers they are capable of doing literally anything at all ever.

Remember that time Google tried to build a smoke detector, because how hard could it be?

Remember that time Googlers turned off the HVAC in one of their SV offices because they were cold, exposing the workers there to dangerous levels of carcinogenic and teratogenic chemicals?

This idiot manchild is a great fit.

everygoldthreadending++

Hey, remember when SfGold was a professional videographer?

Nah man, my short term memory is shot.