Fuze Meeting Review

Full review

With HD images and a smart, clean user interface, Fuze Meeting certainly looks the business. But does it deliver the goods? We looked at the Fuze Meeting offering to see which features stand out.

Sign up

There's a choice between plans when you sign up with Fuze Meeting. You need to decide if you want to buy the service by the day, or by the month. Meetings by the day may be useful if you simply have one important session to complete but if you pay for more than five days in a month you're better off getting an unlimited plan.

The meetings by the day plan allows you 15 web attendees and you can't record the session. The Personal and Plus plans give you 25 and 45 attendees respectively, while the Pro account allows 100 participants and you also get webinar capabilities.

Conferencing features

In order to share your screen during the web conference you need to download an application which makes it possible.

One of the best things about this web conferencing provider? HD. All you images are in high definition so you can zoom in without losing resolution. Mark up images or text onscreen with the text editing tools.

And another useful feature (which the others don’t always offer)? The ability to web conference on mobile devices. The interface on iPhone or Blackberry is just as clear and intuitive as on the PC. If you’re on the iPhone you can view screen sharing and image/ movie files but no other types of media.

The Pro account is where all the extra features are – video conferencing, webinars, meeting recording facilities, unlimited audio conferencing, the ability to Fuze-In all attendees, and conference site branding. Consequently, if you don’t pay for the most expensive package you may feel like you are missing out.

Presenter features

We think it’s good that you can let the system dial everyone in at the start of the meeting – no more worrying about forgetting someone or spending time redialing when you get the busy signal. It’s easy to bring people into the meeting once you’ve started, you add their number to the “Fuze In” list and click to have the system dial them in too.

As presenter you have all the power to set who sees what on the screen. As with most web conferencing services, you can choose to display your whole desktop or selected applications or files. But you can designate a participant to be presenter, giving them the editing and control rights for a specific time.

With the Pro account you can record your meetings in hi-res and play it back.

Video & audio

Participants can join the conference by phone or through VOIP, or by Skype. If you just want an audio conference, you can choose a package from Fuze Meeting that gives you toll-free numbers for dialing in from all over the world. Unlimited toll audio conferencing is included in all of the Fuze Meeting packages.

Video conferencing is not automatically provided. Video conferencing is supported by the Pro package, not by the other package plans.

Security

Fuze Meeting uses SSL encryption to protect the confidentiality of the web conference sessions. And the data is securely stored, as are the passwords of every customer, and their financial details.

For every meeting, Fuze generates a random URL which is a less welcoming system for hackers. Each participant must also request access from the host before being allowed to join the meeting – which may not need to happen if you are dialing out to your participants. After everyone is connected, you can lock the meeting down to prevent anyone else joining.

Ease of use

The interface is simple and one of the most stylish we’ve seen. The experience is a smooth one – participants and organizers see a homepage with tabs and a choice of commands.

Fuze Meeting is compatible with all browsers, Macs and PCs. We found the Fuze Meeting system to be generally very easy to use, for both presenters and participants.

Help & support

If you get into difficulty you can contact the Fuze Meeting team 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There is an email address, toll-free number and live chat function. In addition, there are a number of Quick Start guides to take you through the basic Fuze features.

Overall

Fuze Meeting has a range of product plans to suit your budget and your needs. Fuze Meeting currently offers a 30-day free trial of the service.