Web Conferencing: Should You Do It?
Not every company can benefit from adopting Web conferencing, it depends on your needs, the challenges raised by the location of team members on any given day, and whether time savings will be worth the cost of implementing the technology. Where do you start in determining whether this type of technology could benefit your company?
A thorough, if somewhat wordy (but who am I to talk), look at Web conferencing appeared recently on LinuxInsider, evaluating some of the likely benefits of the technology, including savings on travel, increased productivity, improved workflow and communication between teams, and better work/life balance, which one would assume would mean allowing more people to work from home or come in later, syncing from home to the morning meeting.
While there is some of the normal, "the business world has never been more complex, competitive and challenging" talk, the writer does manage to get quite a bit of useful information through about the advantages of Web conferencing versus some predecessors like audio conferencing â€" advantages like ease-of-use and ability to share documents simultaneously.
More to the point, the article concedes that Web conferencing and file-sharing technologies are not meant to replace the face-to-face interaction, but rather to serve as an additional means of collaboration and file sharing in between those face-to-face meetings â€" a reasonable expectation, which is refreshing amidst all the talk of virtual offices becoming the norm.
As if to directly address the gradual adoption of these technologies, the writer emphasizes that vendors should make these technologies easy to implement, easy to use and accessible to the whole company if they are to catch on. Toward the end of the piece, it is stated to this end that a standards-based solution rooted in Ajax or XHTML doesn't require each user to download a plug-in in order to use Web conferencing technology.
Not surprisingly, given the (open-source) source, the article seems to recommend a software-as-a-service approach rather than what they say is a more costly and difficult to implement on-premise hardware-and-software solution. But it is true that with the support of the provider and the time and cost savings that come from only paying for those team members who will actually use the technology, this approach makes great sense for teams within larger companies that may have different needs than the whole organization.