Meeting Communication

I’ve tried many an online meeting tools. For my business needs we usually used Webex in the past. I keep reading about how online meetings are going to finally “take off”. They did for a while after 9/11 when people limited thier travel. And then online meetings were the answer to beating high travel costs. Webex has become so popular many people use it as the term for an online meeting. “I’d like to invite you to an online, Webex like meeting”, I’ve heard more than once.

Micrsoft believes the market is big enough to buy the #2 in the market: Placeware.com and rename it MS LiveMeeting. I’ve never used it. I have attended placaeware meetings in the past – very similar to Webex. They work well, but often end up being expensive.

Webex lookout. I’ve gone to a GoToMeeting and I’m not going back to Webex. It’s a Cisco product. Cisco makes many great networking products. GoToMeeting is another great product. I tried a few trial meetings and after the second one, I signed up for a yearly contract. I have since conducted a dozen or so sales pitch meetings and the technology worked great. It is easy, quick, responsive, and very cost effective. It’s much cheaper than Webex. Interesting enough, my Webex account exec recently called with a specil summer deal at a much reduced cost, but not good enough for me to consider giving up GoToMeeting.

It’s easy enough to start an impromtu meeting. I can be on the phone with someone and suggest, “would you like to see some before and after slides, then just go to “GoToMeeting.com” and enter this meeting ID. Literally 60 seconds or less we’re viewing the same PowerPoint show. I can also give the meeting attendee control and they can show me examples of thier PowerPoint. This all happens near real time. I have lost the need to check with the meeting attendees if they are viewing the same slide – any time I have ever asked while using GoToMeeting – the slides are syncronized.

It’s a great online meeting communications tool to easily add PowerPoint visuals to your conference calls. You can actually share anything on your desktop, any application, any view. And you can specify what application window you want to share to avoid sharing a messy desktop or confidential information that may be open in another window.

Sharing visuals can add a great deal to a conference call’s communication effectiveness. Give it a try. Maybe someday GoToMeeting will try a promotion of giving out “Frequent User Hours”, like “frequent flier miles”. Besides saving the expense and hassle of travelling, it can save the enourmous time cost invovled in travelling.

Online meetings will neve replace the power and effectiveness of a face to face meeting, but if done properly they can become effective meeting communications in situations where a face to face meeting would never happen because of cost/time/scheduling, or just plain difficult meeting logistics.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 19th, 2007 at 3:16 am and is filed under General.