Web conferencing made simple: experts expect Web conferencing to be widely adopted faster than any previous collaboration technology

Communications News, June, 2004 by Liz Winfeld

The good news for users about Web conferencing products is that they can do a lot that users will, and do, find valuable, innovative, creative and cost-effective. The bad news about Web conferencing technologies and products is that you can only do a lot that you will find valuable, innovative, creative and cost-effective if you understand it all.

Not all Web conferencing products are created equally or even with the same tasks in mind. This is by design, and so knowing what you want from these types of collaborative software products and what you would like to do with them is paramount to your successful adoption of them.

A number of industry experts expect Web conferencing to be widely adopted faster than any technology that has preceded it. They predict that widespread adoption of Web conferencing for all manner of collaborative communications is less than five years away.

Of the three conferencing technologies available audio, video and Web only Web conferencing offers access to all available media in three key categories: conferencing, which is real-time, two-way communications; casting, which is a real-time, one-way broadcast; and caching, which is a non-real-time communication.

As a desktop-centric technology, Web conferencing represents the same sort of instant access to others that the telephone does. In other words, if someone wants to initiate a Web conference with you, he will call, e-mail or instant message you to initiate the conference. If you are not there, your computer will be able to log the attempt so you will know that someone was trying to reach you. There is no need to pre-arrange the meeting, just like most of us do not plan on when the phone is going to ring.

SAVE TIME AND MONEY Benefits of Web conferencing include:

* savings in both hard costs and soft costs, as Web conferencing is a cheaper way of accomplishing certain tasks;

* saving individual and organizational time, contributing directly to productivity;

* simplified access to others inside and outside of the organization with almost no advance notice;

* more-effective teamwork among people working on the same project but from different locations;

* lower training costs and better access to training by more personnel; and

* keeping staff in their primary office location where they are typically more productive.

The various strengths of the Web conferencing products available on the market will be the most important factor in the decision to bring Web conferencing in house. You will have to map those strengths to your needs in order to pick the product, or products, to best meet those needs.

The first question to ask is should you look at these products based on your needs or based on their functions? Evaluating the products based on their functions will yield better results because the needs of a given organization can be a moving target from location to location. Establishing your need for Web conferencing is best accomplished by applying a needs assessment about technology to your precise environment.

In general, Web conferencing products currently fall into four main categories:

General business communications: These are products that offer multifaceted, but integrated, capabilities to host meetings, do broadcasts, hold training sessions and perform customer service and support tasks. WebEx and Interwise are two examples of this all-inclusive mindset.

Collaboration strategies: These products are the direct result of vendors having invested R&D budget on improving the stability of technologies that support work of highly interactive, collaborative teams. These meeting-centric products are also focused on economy of scale, which means they want to deliver in a cost-efficient manner the precise functions needed by smaller to midsize organizations. Tools from Communicast, Genesys Conferencing and LiveMeeting from Microsoft are examples of collaborative software.

Project management focus: These products let people see how one task leads to another, and who is doing what, on a project large or small. For example, if a company wants to revamp the way it tracks service contracts, it must be able to set up each client account as a list of products being supported. This probably requires the coordination of many different databases administered in different locations. Dynamic project management products from companies like Documentum fit this bill.

Training tools: The next frontier for Web conferencing is bound to be as a training medium. Highly interactive and participatory training programs that require a lot of give-and-take are not likely to be as successful as those where a skill or concept is being taught in more of a lecture style, even though there might be interactive elements. Questions can be raised, but less discussion or debate is probable.

TRAINING SCENARIO DIFFERENT

Since 2001, a push has been on to develop user interfaces within Web conferencing products that provide the kinds of functions that people specifically expect from training scenarios and to differentiate training delivery from collaborative meeting applications. In a collaborative meeting held by Web conference, smaller groups are common, as is a common frame of reference; and everyone can offer content.