Friday, July 22, 2011

Mikogo screensharing has limitations.

As I already posted, the free Mikogo screensharing app impressed was as it was crossplatform and operated from a browser only on the Viewer side.
I started a thread in the Mikogo forum because I couldn't get get File Sharing or Chat to work.
Well, turns out that to get File Transfer or Chat working you actually have to download the app on the Viewer side too.
OK, it's not such a big problem -- as long as there's a version of Mikogo for your OS which there isn't for FreeBSD or Haiku.
Nevertheless, once the downloaded version of the Viewer is installed File Transfer and Chat works very smoothly with File Transfer being very straightforward from whichever side to any other.
However, I was disappointed to find that the downloaded version of the Viewer does not support whiteboarding. However, I have to say that whiteboarding when it does work is almost unusable as it takes up to 5 minutes for changes to show up on any other computer.
Possibly the biggest problem I experienced with Mikogo, working only with a LAN, is the fact that the Internet speeds (ping, D/L and U/L) all reduce very significantly in speed while Mikogo is operating.
I also found that Mikogo uses an inordinate amount of CPU (up to 50% for me).
Teamviewer6, on the other hand, just works. Of course, the app must be installed on all participating computers but screensharing, chat and file transfer work perfectly with essentially no delays between computers.
Whiteboarding I couldn't get to work and perhaps this is because I'm using the free version.
In any event, my conclusion for the moment is that Mikogo, after some initial promise is not even a shadow of TeamViewer so I doubt if I'll be using it much in the future.

2 comments:

  1. This is also good.
    The software works well, Ammyy Admin doesn't require installation or specific config, works behind gateways NAT as well as within one LAN.

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  2. Yeah, in addition to hosted solutions from Mikogo/Teamviewer, you may want to consider a RHUB web conference server. It works well.

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