Web conferencing: Be there, even when you're not

By Esther Schindler

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Traveling is never easy, whether its purpose is a social call across town, or a cross-continent trip to make the biggest sales presentation of your life. New technology can now use High-Speed Internet services to help you cut down on travel by using web conferencing to hold online meetings. Whether you work for a large corporation or run your business from your home office, these tools will help you bridge the distance without ever leaving the ground.

Travel is expensive, it's time consuming and it's exhausting. Because you make business (and sometimes personal) decisions based on the effort involved and the likelihood of its payback, every trip is weighed carefully. "Is this prospective customer big enough to justify an airline flight?" you ask yourself. Or you contemplate, "This client always wants handholding, and it's 40 miles away -- I bet I'd spend two hours driving there, just for 10 minutes worth of billable time." If you're certain that you can justify the travel, it's no problem. But too many opportunities are lost, and too much time is wasted.

It doesn't need to be that way. While nothing is as rewarding as the firmness of a customer's handshake, and "face time" can pay off in immeasurable ways, online conferences can often help you solve immediate problems that would otherwise require a travel budget. Using these Web-based services, you can make marketing presentations, provide technical support, teach classes and show coworkers a project's status. In fact, using these tools, you can do anything you might do if the other person was sitting next to you, looking at your computer monitor.

Even if you never need to run a conference yourself, you may be asked to attend one. Increasingly, companies offer "Webinars" in which someone (usually with an agenda and sales quota, though not always) demonstrates a nifty use of their technology, runs a class in how to use a product, or shares the company's financial reports.

In this article, I show you how these Web conferences work, so you have some idea of what is involved, and you can decide if these services are useful for your needs.

While a handful of companies attempt to compete in this software category, two companies dominate the Web conferencing market: WebEx.com and GoToMeeting. Their competitors work in a similar manner, so even if you choose another company, you'll have an idea of what to expect.

Getting started

WebEx and GoToMeeting both charge a fee to the conference host; the participants pay nothing for the service. The membership or hosting fees vary quite a bit based on several criteria, such as the number of attendees expected for an individual meeting and your meeting frequency. To give you some idea, however, the base price for GoToMeeting, as of mid-2007, is $49 per month. That's probably less than the cost of the tank of gas you'd consume to visit some clients.

Both companies offer a free trial, which lets you kick their tires. WebEx's trial is somewhat less invasive, as GoToMeeting collects credit card information and will charge you if you don't opt out.

In any case: as a conference host, you go to the company's site and log in. If you haven't visited earlier, the Web site installs its own application on your computer. You can schedule a meeting for a later time, including sending invitations via email. Or you can instantly start a meeting, and tell the participants how to login. It's also possible to set up recurring meetings, so that your far-flung staff can have a Monday morning meeting at the same time every week with the same login info.

Under most circumstances, these meetings can be Web-only. That is, if you want to include audio too -- and you probably do -- you also need to arrange for a conference phone call. Some vendors such as Webex have the option to include audio conference too. Otherwise, you will need to find an telephone conferencing service.

If you're a participant in a Web conference, the task is even simpler. Usually, the conference host sends you an email message that links directly to the right Web site. You probably do need to install the supporting software, but that's a quick, one-time occurrence. All you need to do is supply your name and email ID, and you're in.

Hosting meetings

Once the meeting is underway and the participants have arrived, the Web site shows the conference organizer a list of attendees and a set of options.

Most commonly, the conference organizer shares an application or a document. That is, you might crank up PowerPoint to show the slides on your computer, load the architectural drawings for your client's new home, or show the class a video demonstration. The participants see whatever the organizer displays, but they cannot click on it or otherwise interact with it. You're completely in control.

That is, if you want to be. All of the tools let you give control to another computer. If you're a professor on a panel discussion debating the fate of the dinosaurs, that option would let you give another Web conference participant the opportunity to display her own slides from her own computer.

As the conference organizer, you can also let people annotate documents and "draw on them," which can help for project collaboration. That feature can be turned on for only a few participants or for all of them.

If circumstances require it, you can also share your entire desktop -- not just a single application. The advantage to doing so is that you don't have to "start sharing" and "stop sharing" for each application, which can get slightly confusing. If you use this feature, be sure to turn off any applications that you don't want others to see. A coworker who was sharing his desktop with 20 people had left his instant messaging (IM) application running; in the middle of his serious presentation about progress towards quarterly goals, an IM window popped up from his wife saying, "Hi, honey! I love you!"

WebEx, GoToMeeting, and other such applications offer quite a few more capabilities. For example, each Web conferencing application lets participants "chat" with other participants or with the discussion leaders, and enables people to "raise their hands" to ask a question. It's a cool feature, but I've never seen it seriously used. Everyone on the phone just barges in as they do on every conference call. Other sometimes-useful features let organizers track who attended and for how long, and record meetings for later playback. Conference organizers can run polls. The software can be integrated with email clients, such as Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook, to remind participants and leaders about the meeting. And so on.

What's it all mean? That you don't have to hurl yourself into rush hour traffic when a business associate asks you to show her what you've accomplished on her project. Or that you can give a marketing presentation to someone on the other side of the country -- or the world -- without worrying whether they're a "serious prospect" who would justify a long airline trip (and airline food). The services can change the way you do business… in a very good way.