Interactive Web Conferencing
Web conferencing is a viable alternative for business people who are looking to save time and money. Although nothing will ever replace person to person contact, online meetings allow users to interactively communicate through things such as the sharing of desktop screens, document sharing, video, and VoIP (sound). Generally, the more features a program has, the more expensive it is going to be.
Web meeting solutions are, in today’s technological age, very easy to use, which is important when you want to want a meeting to run smoothly. They also have very few technical issues. If you want to utilize a web conferencing program for your business you’ll have to pay more if you want, say, 30, rather than only 15 people in a meeting. You can expect to pay around $50 per month for a web conferencing tool.
Webex and Gotomeeting are the most popular web conferencing solutions, with Webex being the more popular of the two. In fact, some people refer to an online meeting as simply Webex. Although Gotomeeting is the cheaper of the two, you can get 10 more people for each meeting if you use Webex (25 rather than 15). Since you pay a flat rate monthly fee for each of these two services, you can use them as often as you want.
A web conferencing program can be fun to use. However, you should buy it with a break even point in the back of your mind. Will the $500 yearly cost pay for itself in travel expenses and opportunity cost? Can you get by, just by using free options such as Skype web conferencing or Yugma?
When shopping around for a web conferencing tool you also want to find out if it is easy enough to set up for users. Some web meeting programs can be used from any browser.
In the end, which web meeting program you take advantage of depends on what you need. If you need to show clients a lot of detailed artwork files, Fuze Meeting is worth a look because it specializes in sharing files or documents with a high quality format. If you desire many nice features, Microsoft Live Meeting is worth looking into. If you want to communicate with only several clients without sharing files, Skype would be a good choice.