Your company has to
conduct business every day with people who live both near and far. For most
midsize and larger companies, the vast majority of their day-to-day
interactions with customers, partners and often even their own internal
employees happen at a distance rather than face-to-face.
For most types of
at-a-distance communication, the telephone more than suffices. The phone has
been an essential business instrument for decades. There is one serious
drawback with phone-based conferencing: the inability to express non-verbal
communication – like facial expressions and gestures – which is such an
important part of business interaction.
Of course, in
addition to the telephone, many companies allow their employees to travel by
ground, air, or even sea to meet their customers directly. However, the
drawbacks to this alternative are obvious: the high cost and the inability to
communicate “at the drop of a hat.”
A Company Conferencing Solution: The Web
Conferencing Alternative
Web conferencing is
a rather generic term that actually refers to a cluster of related technologies
that individuals, companies and other organizations use to communicate over the
Internet with each other in real time, inexpensively and at-a-distance.
In fact, not only
does web conferencing merely overcome the limitations of telephone-based
conferencing or travel, but it offers some additional benefits as well. For
example, in web conferencing – depending upon the system – one has the ability
to collaborate on projects (e.g., sharing a CAD application remotely), make
text-based notes for later archiving & review, and sharing streaming video
or other applications. Users can even share each others’ screens with a feature
called desktop sharing.
A Huge Number of Providers in the Marketplace
There are a number
of providers in the marketplace today who design, build, market and manage web
conferencing solutions. Each system goes by a different name and product
description, so there is no official list of all such providers.
The key is to find
a system that is within your price range and has the features (both user
features and security-related features) that you need. Providers generally
build their systems for very different intended uses, although many or most of
the systems can be used for a number of overlapping reasons.
Given that there is
no single way to encapsulate all of these systems under a single,
all-encompassing term; it is useful to get a handle on the various ways the
systems can be used.
To get an idea of
where you should be looking, here is a category-by-category breakdown of the
major web conferencing system types available in the market today:
* Basic meeting:
for simple desktop sharing and chat
* Customer support
and remote access: used mainly by customer service or internal IT people to
“take over” a user’s computer for the purposes of support
* Rich media
sharing: ideal for media companies and creative individuals
* Education and
training: made for conducting training sessions over the Internet
* Enterprise work
collaboration: these systems are used to work on projects together among
remotely-located participants
* Webcasting and
webinars: for one-to-many presentations conducted on a large scale
Leverage this guide
as you look for a company conferencing solution.
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