Fuze Meeting is a free online meeting service allows sharing of video in high definition (HD) for up to 15 people.  Adobe Connect allows considerably less participants in its free online meeting offering.  It also expands online meetings to smartphones such as the Apple iPhone, Blackberry and, soon, Windows Mobile devices.

For those familiar with Adobe Connect’s interface, using Fuze Meeting web interface will be a natural transition.  After you’ve created your free account, a simple straight-forward process, and logged into your account, you’re taken to the Meeting page which displays a dashboard type page.  There are other pages for maintaining contact information and viewing your account information.  On the Meeting page, there are tabs for viewing Upcoming Meetings, Past Meetings, and your Content Library which stores your pictures, videos and other files (such as documents, spread sheets and presentations) to be used in your meeting.

The Quickstart section allows you to start a new meeting right away or schedule a meeting.  Starting a new meeting takes you to a meeting page which displays your online (web) attendees, your call attendees, and a chat box for IM’ing attendees.  If someone attends your meeting that you don’t want in the meeting, you can simply remove them.  Audio attendees may be fetched, however this option is disabled for the free trial accounts.  Fetching an attendee means Fuze will call the phone number or contact you provide to have them attend the meeting.  Call attendees can be muted and unmuted singly or en masse.  The phone number of Call attendees is displayed for each attendee.  This allows you to determine if someone is attending the meeting that should not be and remove them from the meeting.  Call attendees hear music until the host dials into the conference.  The Quickstart tab on the new meeting page allows you to share your desktop (this option is “Coming Soon”), add content (files and whiteboard) to the meeting or send e-mail invitiations.  The Info menu pops up a box showing the meeting URL and dial in information.  To end the meeting, simply click the End Meeting menu.

The Contacts page allows you to organize the people you invite to meetings.  You can create and delete groups of contacts, create and delete contacts, see all contacts and search for specific contacts.  Contacts can be imported from various avenues including Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and Outlook Express.  Contacts can also be exported to a CSV (comma separated value) formatted file.

My Account allows you to view and modify information about your account including your subscription type, billing information (if you upgrade your account), contact information, password, e-mail invitiations options (awkwardly labeled as Email Notification Options even though it deals with invitation options), audio meeting options, IM options (Fuze can be used as a web IM client for popular IM services), and some optional applications (which are not required to use Fuze, but just enhance the experience for some users).

The iPhone app allows you create an account or login using your existing Fuze account.  Once logged in you can see your contacts (from the Contacts page mentioned above), chat with attendees, view meetings, start a new meeting, view/modify your info and change various settings (including server, IM, Contact List/Status options, and Notification options).

If you use Fuze Meeting, please drop us a comment about this service.

To get more information and sign up for your free account, visit https://www.fuzemeeting.com/ .