Virtual Meetings
We’ve been really clobbered with snow the last week, and our offices have either been closed or run late several days. However, two meetings that were scheduled during this period went on as usual, despite the fact that the attendees couldn’t make it. We were using GotoMeeting, an online meeting and screen-sharing system from Citrix. (This is definitely a good news/bad news thing - after all, a snow day used to mean you didn’t have to work!) I’ve used GotoMeeting for three years, primarily for broadcasting a shared screen in parallel to a video conference to get around the poor resolution of sharing a computer display via video conference technology.
The big change in the product is that earlier this year they added voice. Before you needed to use a phone conference, Skype, or some other way to get audio to the participants. Now it’s part of the product, and it’s a real game-changer. What I particularly like is the very simple, direct interface - it’s very intuitive and does a really good job of staying out of your way and just letting you concentrate on your meeting or presentation.
There are other options out there. Elluminate is a more full-featured product for distance learning (and for Washington state public and private schools has special pricing through the Washington Learning Source.) Yugma has free and paid versions, as does Dimdim. Comotiv is a related product focused on creating online collaboration. Adobe has Acrobat Connect and the grandaddy of them all is WebEx. Some of these products have videoconferencing, some let you send out files to the other participants, some have shared whiteboards, and all let you record a meeting for future playback.
While tools like this have been around for awhile, the big change in the last couple of years has been a huge drop in cost. You can now access these online collaboration tools for 10% or less than what the same capabilities would have cost three years ago. All you need is a good microphone, headphones (to prevent echoing), and a quick download to give it a try. Oh, yeah, and someone to try it with!