I ran across this post announcing a new competitor to WebEx, called ZOHO Meeting. The article is glowing; though ZOHO is an advertiser on the site, so bring your grain of salt along. The comments following the post are fairly useful, as several other alternatives are mentioned.

I remember how a similar product, Microsoft’s NetMeeting, changed my world. I was working on a team that included people in London, New York, Connecticut, and California. The ability to easily share a pc desktop made it much easier to collaborate. We used it all the time for one-on-one sessions between developers, internal demos, trouble-shooting, and during meetings.

It caught on all over the company and very quickly sales and support saw how valuable this functionality was. While NetMeeting worked well behind the firewall, it wasn’t the right solution for dealing with folks outside. We used WebEx for a while, and then we switched to another similar service. Both worked well and provided a ton of value.

If you have to work in distributed team, I highly recommend using this type of tool.