Yesterday I had my first real life experience with Yugma, a web conferencing software. I work a lot with WebEx and really like it, but i thought let's try something different.
So last weekend I surfed to the home page of Yugma and signed up for a free account. The free account includes a 15 day trial of the pro version and setting it up was a no brainer. After signing up I downloaded the installer and ran it at one of my PCs at home (OS is Windows Vista Home Edition). It worked like a charm and a few minutes later I was able to start my first meeting with Yugma.
I had planned a web conference for yesterday, and decided in all my naivity to run the conference with Yugma. That was a big mistake...
It started with the installation of Yugma on one of my other PCs (OS is Windows Vista Ultimate Edition). The installation worked like a charm, but when I wanted to start Yugma the following message popped up:
Application cannot run without client.properties file
After some searching on the web I found multiple blog posts describing the error. The most promising was this post about the
yugma client.properties file. But it did not solve my issue. I never moved my user directory. I made a fresh install and I still get the error.
Wat was wondering me about the post is that it describes the exact same error as I had, and it was written in June 2008. This makes you think that Yugma had enough time to solve this issue. Even greater was my astonishment when I saw a comment from nobody else then the CEO of Yugma.
Thanks for tracking this down. I recently joined Yugma as CEO and I want to sincerely thank you for your helpful research.
Best,
Vas Bhandarkar
So next stop was the website of Yugma itself, and after some searching I found an entry on their
forum. Be aware that when you follow this link you have to wait very VERY long before the page is loaded. Here Yugma states the following:
The "client.properties" error comes from a rare bug in Vista where an important Registry setting is set incorrectly by default. This entry must be fixed manually before Yugma can work.
Please note that making changes to the Windows Registry can cause major damage to your Windows installation if done incorrectly - it is highly recommended to have a professional perform this change or have someone from our technical support staff walk you through it.
The entry was made in November 2008, and that is where I got really dissapointed. When you know you have this issue you will make a solution for it. A manual entry in the register is NOT a solution. Especially not for less experienced computer users.
A quote from one of the comments on the forum entry:
This configuration is not rare, and I am quite sure it never works. I have seen on other blogs other user having this problem for months, without correction made from yugma. It cannot be so rare, as when you start googling yugma and a space, google suggest "yugma client.properties file" automatically.
But because I was still interested in how Yugma works I followed the described steps and got the darn thing working. So last night the mentioned web conference took place based on Yugma. The other participants had no problem installing and running the client, so that was good news, and we actually got going with our conference.
We used the telephone conference provider from Yugma that allowed us to dial in a number, give in the meeting ID and that way talk to each other. This worked for about half an hour and then we got kicked out of the telephone conference. We were not able to dial in anymore since we only got the busy tone when we dialed the provided number. So we had to move to an alternative.
That made it final. Yugma sucks. Their software sucks, their support sucks, and their telephone conferencing sucks. So bye bye Yugma, you will never ever be installed on one of my machines again. And I would have been a paying user, cause the pro version contains stuff I need for my conferencing ...
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