Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » Cool open source web conferencing product: DimDim

July 26, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Cool open source web conferencing product: DimDim

TAGS: Open Source

I've been tracking a cool startup since Linuxworld Boston, and was glad to see them formally launch at OSCON today. DimDim is the company, and they are to WebEx and web conferencing what SugarCRM is to Salesforce.com and Alfresco is to Sharepoint (and Documentum):

An open source, value-rich competitor that should keep the proprietary competition up at night.

The product is still in alpha, but will go beta in September and production in November. (You can sign up to be part of the alpha and beta on their site.) I saw a demo today, and thought it was fantastic. Still some rough edges to work out, but remarkably well designed and it performed quite well. By November, I hope to cancel my WebEx account (WebEx crashes on us at least once per demo...) and move to DimDim. Frankly, my experience with WebEx has been so bad that I'll be using the alpha version of DimDim. It could still crash every other demo and be 100% better than WebEx. :-)

Under the covers, DimDim is yet another story of a successful, cohesive development team going from nada to alpha in just a few months. In their case, it took them three engineers and six months to get to a solid alpha. This is similar to Alfresco and SugarCRM, both of which had exceptionally short initial development cycles because of a strong development team that has worked together before and intelligent use of existing open source software (In DimDim's case, they leveraged open source code libraries (e.g. log4J), components (quartz scheduling component) and pre-packaged products (Helix Streaming Server)).

A few other things I like:

1. DimDim is presence aware, and will integrate all major instant messaging systems.

2. They're going for 100% transparency as a company, with code 100% open source, roadmap and technical documentation available online, etc.

3. Ajax-based web meeting console. No client-side application necessary.

4. They have the coolest logo of any of the open source companies, including my own. I'd like a T-shirt, please. :-)

Of the applications I use every day, web conferencing ranks up there as one of the top five. Email, browser, IM, VOIP, and web conferencing. It's how we interact with our customers, and how we often provide support. I'm therefore very grateful that we'll have a strong, credible open source alternative to the proprietary systems on the market.

Good work, DimDim!

Posted by Matt Asay on July 26, 2006 06:24 PM

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