Interactive Web Meeting
Web meetings or web conferences are saving a lot of business people time and money. Although real meetings are always better than online ones, the trade off is more than worth it considering the amount of travel costs and time that are saved. These days, web conferencing programs are getting more feature intensive, with most having some type of desktop/document sharing capability, video, and VoIP.
Web meetings are very simple to use. In fact, its hard finding one that is not easy to work with. Furthermore, very few have technical issues. All of this is important when you want meetings to go smooth and without error. For a web meeting program, whose core feature is desktop sharing, you are going to have to drop about $50 a month.
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 costs less, 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 whenever you want.
Before you or your business invests in a web conference meeting product, make sure that you actually are going to use it. Yes, they’re cool and fun to use, but they are also a very real expense, especially if you use them for at least a year. Free alternatives include Skype conferencing for 5 participants and Yugma’s free version.
When shopping for a web meeting program, rather than just focusing on the features, you want to see if it is easy to set up for the participants that will be in your meetings.
What web conferencing product you end up getting depends on what you need. Say you are a video game design studio. Fuze Meeting, which costs about $30, is your best choice since it offers HD communication. If you only wish to chat with a few clients or trainees, Skype will do you just fine.
Jeremy is the author of Best Web Conferencing and Interactive Online Meeting.