Why Not Have a Virtual Meeting?
Do you sometimes find
it difficult to get everyone in the same room at the same time
to hold a meeting particularly as more and more staff do at least
some of their work from home? Or wish you didn't have to take
time to travel across town to collaborate with colleagues.
Fortunately over the last few years
the options for holding 'virtual' meetings have expanded
greatly. So why waste time and money travelling to
meetings when technology can help. It's greener too!
Instant messaging
An easy option - real-time
conversation via your PC. All you need is an instant messaging
provider and basic keyboard skills to keep up with the
conversation.
Teleconferencing
Teleconferencing allows groups of
people to communicate by phone. There are two main ways to do this;
either use a teleconferencing company where attendees call a
designated number and usually enter a pin, good for larger numbers
of participants, or use your in-house phone where the facilitator
can place a call for each participant. Depending on the
sophistication of your phone system more features may be
available.
If you use a teleconferencing company
costs will vary from free except for the price of the call, to a
fixed cost for signing up for a monthly service or the more
expensive option of a premium service which will have
more features such as monthly reporting, welcome messages and call
recording.
Examples of teleconferencing companies
include conference
genie and powownow.
You can also use Skype, which is
simple and easy to use. All you need to do
is download the software to your pc and/or
mobile, get a Skype username set up and getting
going. It can be used for both one to one meetings and
teleconferencing. Calls are free to everyone using Skype
and charges will only apply to calls to non Skype users - you
just need to set up a business user account
We love using Skype - we use it for
meetings and one to one calls - it saves money and the sound
quality is excellent.
Video-conferencing
As the name suggest similar to
teleconferencing but with video as well. You can do it via your
desktop for which you will need a camera and a headset. A broadband
connection will help reduce delays in transmitting video images.
Some solutions require software to be downloaded whilst with others
you just sign on over the web.
Bigger companies will have more
sophisticated solutions with video-conferencing facilities set up
in meeting rooms to allow contact with larger numbers of
people.
Many video-conferencing sites also
allow you to share your desktop, presentations, applications and
documents and so are extremely similar to web conferencing which is
discussed below.
Cheaper options are Skype and iVisit.
Web conferencing
In a web conference, everyone sits at
their computer and connect to others over the internet. As in
video-conferencing this can be either through a downloaded
application on each participants PC or a web-based application
where the attendees access the meeting by clicking on an emailed
link. Web conferencing can also be used for training and
presentations.
Web conferencing has lots of features
that can help collaboration. You can make use of file sharing,
interactive text chat, polling, whiteboards and co-browsing to take
participants to web applications of interest.
You may need to include a conference
call for voice communication.
Examples:
Webex (we've used Webex
for presentations and training)
MegaMeeting
DimDim
So you've sorted out the technology
why not read our top tips for holding virtual
meetings.
