by: Peter Black
Introduction
Are you confused by all the buzz words surrounding conferencing calling? There’s audio calling, web conferencing, video conferencing, teleconferencing and many more.
The intention of this article is to give you an introduction to Web Conferencing. I’ll describe its capabilities and features. You should then be able to decide if it is suitable for your particular circumstances.
Traditional Conferencing
A traditional physical conference can involve a lot of hassle and disruption to your normal working day. You have to make travel arrangement, book a hotel, travel overnight to get to the conference in the morning. Not only that, when you get back to work the following day you need to catch up on all the work that you didn’t do whilst you were at the conference.
I am not going to suggest that web conference calling is going to totally replace the benefits of face to face meetings. But what you might be able to do is use a web conferencing solution to enhance your business. For example you may currently have a face to face conference with all your regional managers on a monthly basis. Perhaps with a regular web conference call you could reduce the need for a physical conference down to just once every three months.
Benefits Of Web Conferencing
Here are some of the things that you can do with interactive web conferencing. Perhaps you can think of ways that you can use these to reduce your current conferencing costs and expenses. Document sharing. This means that your remote colleagues can view your documents such as Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. On their web browsers they can watch as you move through the documents.
Whiteboards. This is exactly what you would do in a physical conference. For example you could draw a graph or diagram on your virtual white board and your colleagues can interact with it as well, making corrections, suggestions and alterations. You could use the virtual whiteboards to outline your proposals, just as you would in a real conference facility.
Other Business Applications For Web Conference Calling.
Business Benefits Of Web Conferencing
What equipment is required?
You can start with cheap web conferencing very easily to see if it is suitable for your working practices. I suggest that you visit the website shown at the end of this article to view details of the many web conferencing solutions and products that are available.
Basically you just need an up to date web browser and a good internet connection. Using a dial up connection is possible, but you really need a broadband connection to get the greatest benefits from a web conference call.
At a very simple level, say a one to one meeting, you could use web conferencing to show and share a document with your college and speak to him at the same time via your normal telephone system. Eventually as you can see the huge benefits of web conferencing you can investigate using the other conferencing techniques that are described at my website.