Google Hangouts: the jury is out

Yesterday I had a virtual meeting scheduled with a client and a designer – we we’re going to look at some concepts, make some changes and generally talk our way through the process. There are an array of collaboration tools out there that allow small groups of people to share files, screens, audio, video, and generally reproduce the feeling of being in the same room. Having used Google Hangouts for a few meetings of this kind in the past, I thought it would be perfect for this meeting – it’s simple to use, and fairly powerful.

So … for reasons that we’ll never be able to understand, it failed. Not a complete catastrophe, but screen-sharing didn’t work, so it wasted out time and set the project back a couple of days.

The question is: what is a screen/doc-sharing collaboration service that is easy to use, and affordable?