I have been a faithful DimDim user since David Jakes told me about it at NYSCATE in November of last year. I ended up purchasing a year’s subscription right before they got bought by Salesforce. While I still have a few months left on my subscription, I decided to go hunting for a new solution, so as not to be hurried. Here are my needs/wants/etc…

1. Easy phone conferencing. One feature I adore about DimDim is the included voice conferencing. Lots of the folks I deal with don’t care for VOIP, and neither do I.
2. Screen sharing.
3. Cost effective

Aside from those two options, everything else is icing on the cake. The vast majority of webinars, technical support calls, and conference calls I do need only those two options. However, that proved quite difficult to find.

I explored several of the major conferencing providers, and discovered that most, if not all, charge lots of money for phone conferencing. For example:

• Cisco’s WebEx – charges by the minute for phone conferencing.
• Elluminate – charges by the minute for phone conferencing.
• Fuze Meeting – costs a bundle monthly.

And so on and so forth.

Note that I do not mind paying for a service that works. I pay for DimDim. But I could not see paying by the minute for phone conferencing.

Enter join.me.

I initially discovered join.me as I needed a quick and easy solution to helping my parents with their ailing computer. join.me allowed me to control their computers with ease.

Did you know every join.me session comes with a free phone conferencing session? I didn’t. I learned it did. And I was hooked.

In fact, every join.me session allows up to 250 people to participate on the phone conference. For free. Outstanding.

So now I am using join.me as my conferencing provider. I fire up my presentation in Keynote or Google Presentations and present that way. I get a chat room, phone conference, and can even let others participate.

And, there are Android and iOS apps for viewing presentations.

So I’m a join.me convert. Try it and let me know what you think.

Full disclosure: Since I heart join.me so much and have been using it so much over the last few months, we decided to work together. So I am helping them perfect an already outstanding product a few hours each month. My opinion of the product is not shaped by our agreement, I work with them because I believe they’ve got a good thing going.