Review: Go Get GoToMeeting for iPad

I'm on the road a lot. But when I'm in Chicago, I am a remote worker, operating from my home office. 

Our company uses GoToMeeting quite a bit - both for internal meetings & presentations, and for assisting clients with remote forensic collections of their data for litigation. 

It's a very versatile and powerful web platform - essentially, a conference call in which all of the participants can hear each other, either over the phone or through their computer's microphone & speakers. 

At the same time, all of the participants can see the selected "presenter's" computer screen - and any participant can be given control of the presenter's computer. 

As you can imagine, this is incredibly useful for, say, operating a powerful forensic tool for a client employee based in, say, China.

The only problem is, we're interviewing that employee and logging responses at the same time. And if the GoToMeeting is showing the target's screen on my monitor, I can't see MY monitor!

So I've had to switch windows a lot if I intend to record responses in a database. How can they make this easier?


The initial answer was "get a second monitor". And admittedly, that worked great. But in recent weeks, I've had issues with IE9 failing to launch G2M - probably a plug-in issue - and when it did work, it took quite a while to connect.

And more distressingly, the configuration of my mic & speakers was causing a delayed echo effect for other participants. That had to stop.... but I didn't want to have to use my cell phone for every meeting - I need my hands free for typing, and the speaker phone isn't a great solution.

So a while back, I got the GoToMeeting iPad app. And just like that, everything changed.

Launch and login is remarkably quick. The audio tools are perfect - I can mute and unmute, everyone comes through loud and clear, and I can pinch-to-zoom on the target's desktop.

All while my hands - and my computer monitor - are completely free.

I don't use my iPad for work very often. But I think I'll use it for every online meeting I take from now on - and that's 2-3 times daily. This app is that good.

It's never crashed or hung on me, and I've never heard a complaint re: audio quality.

For a remote worker, this iPad functionality has been a godsend. I've been able to conduct forensic collections from my car - parked outside of a Starbucks and using their internet connection for the iPad, while using my laptop for data entry.

It is a near-perfect utilization of the "second screen" concept - handling all of the communication without encumbering my computer.

FINAL SCORE: 9/10