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Major GoToMeeting Update Seeks to Please Users and IT

LogMeIn’s GoToMeeting is a well-rated web conferencing solution that counts more than 25 million customers. General Manager of Unified Communications and Collaboration Mark Strassman told ZDNet the major revamp is based on user feedback and intended to modernize the end-user experience while keeping IT admins happy.

“It used to be you’re either a consumer company focusing on a great end user experience, or you're an enterprise company focusing on it experience," Strassman, SVP and GM of UCC at LogMeIn, said to ZDNet. Now, Strassman said, "there really is sort of a new paradigm doing both well. You have to please the end user, you have to please IT. And you have to recognize that you can't compromise down the middle."

– ZDNet

The new version of GoToMeeting is described as a total reimagination of the product and as LogMeIn’s “biggest release yet” in the web conferencing category. Here’s a rundown of the main new features that users will be experiencing:

• The Hub, a pre-meeting interface that’s intended to manage all of your meetings. This is where you’ll schedule, start, and join meetings. You can also chat with other users.
• The ability to create multiple personal meeting rooms that each have their own custom branding. Each user could customize the frills around their meeting experience.
• It’s now 65% faster to join a meeting compared to the previous version.
• New mobile apps.
• A redesigned in-meeting interface that focuses on connecting users by video and making it obvious what they’re sharing on screen.
• Consistent design across all devices, including PC, Mac, iOS, and Android.
• AI-powered transcription and unlimited cloud storage. This means that every meeting has a text transcript that can be shared with attendees afterwards.
• A meeting diagnostics report that shows IT admins information about audio and video quality and offers insight into the root cause of meeting quality issues.

The new release sees GoToMeeting following two trends in the web conferencing software market. It puts meeting scheduling at the forefront of its users’ workflows, and it incorporates new AI features to save the tedium of note-taking tasks.

Source: GoToMeeting blog, published October 1, 2019.

Our Take

LogMeIn wasn’t facing an urgent need to overhaul its product. GoToMeeting ranks in the leader quadrant of the SoftwareReviews Web Conferencing category with a composite score of 8.3 out of 10 and with 84% of users being likely to recommend it to others. But LogMeIn must know that if you wait to improve things until users feel that your product is dated, then you’ve already waited too long. It’s showing an awareness of the direction of the market towards a unified communications experience that offers a consumer level of experience to workers while allowing IT to manage it all. It will be interesting to see how the new product impacts the user review scores in a year from now.

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