When You Can't Get There From Here!

Web Conferencing Trends

Remember a few years back when a contractor punched a hole in the city of Chicago's underground tunnels? Water flooded in and suddenly the entire substructure of the city was in trouble. Agencies throughout the city, along with building managers, management companies, tenants, and, of course, the public wanted to know NOW what was happening.

Imagine if any of those interested parties could have simply clicked onto the command post computer via their web browsers and actually seen the plans of the city. See where the city was working to fix the problem. See their city working to solve the problem. Today they could have done that easily through web conferencing.

It's the hottest thing on the web. Real interactivity. People talking together, showing slides, sharing desktops, from all around the globe - all for the price of a local phone call!

No . . . bandwidth over the Internet still does not really permit effective videoconferencing over the web. That still looks like you're sending a series of fuzzy snapshots - not bad for a few applications - but also not ready for business prime time.

But "conferencing" over the web is becoming very cool, very fast, very effective, and very cheap.

So what do we mean by "web conferencing" and how can we effectively use it to get ahead?

There are many many different configurations that allow people to share information (including audio, pictures, and video) over the web. Let me give you a framework to help you decide how to choose technology for any meeting. Then I will tell you my particular web conferencing preferences, and then tell you where you can check out examples - some of which are 100% free!!!

Before you select which service or software you want to use for web conferencing, it is important to be sure just what you need to communicate and what level of support you need to make sure that communication really happens. A story will illustrate.

A fellow trainer once called me in a panic. Her $250,000 fully approved and funded training program was in jeopardy. Her client, a very large bank, no longer wanted to fly in their VPs for the training. They wanted to use the Kinkos Videoconferencing network to deliver the training. Could she revise her plan?

Not wanting to appear "behind the times," she replied cheerfully, "No problem!" Immediately she called me. "What do I do now? How can I keep this client."

"Don't worry," I calmly intoned. "This might be a great learning experience for you and a real benefit to your client! Tell me what your training outcomes are supposed to be." "We are to train their VPs at each bank how to communicate more effectively with their subordinates," was the reply.

"Hmm, let me see if I got this straight. They want their branch VPs to leave their office, travel to the local Kinkos, sit in a videoconference room by themselves, and you will then teach them how to communicate more effectively with people. You will never see everyone in the conference simultaneously. Indeed, you won't see someone at all unless they choose to speak, activating the voice-response camera system."

What's wrong with this picture? The training outcomes of this project called for interactive participation, skill building, and so-called "soft skill" training. This would have been a very bad application of this wonderful technology.

Now, let me offer another scenario. The bank learns that Alan Greenspan, Chairman the Federal Reserve Bank, is going to announce a new interest rates at a noon press conference today. We invite the VP of Lending of each bank to attend a videoconference where all of us will watch the conference simultaneously. After the conference, the Bank's chief economist will share his view of Greenspan's speech and how he thinks we should respond on lending rates. If anyone in the field has questions, they can ask them. We will all see the questioner and whoever answers the question.

THIS is an excellent application of the exact same technology for the same client. It will be very effective because the communication transaction needed for this training outcome is very different. We need to hear the words of the Chairman, see his attitude, review the bank's position, ask questions, and be prepared to respond to questions at our branches. Very different than learning how to communicate effectively with subordinates!

Select the type of communication technology you need to support the communication transaction you are supporting.

There are many things we can share over the web. Here are some of the most common applications.

Electronic Presentations

Think about many of the PowerPoint presentations you have experienced over the past few years. Although the presenter is there "live," a great deal of the effective communication happens because of what the presenter said and showed in the talk.

Being face-to-face allows us the best chance to communicate in most cases. And we should probably always try to do that. But schedules today simply won't allow that to happen as often as we would like.

Today we often resort to a simple phone call. But wouldn't it be better if you could "see" what they were talking about on the phone as well as "hear" it? Of course. Well, there are a large number of ways we can visually share presentations on the web today. So you might think of one kind of web conferencing as PowerPoint presentations without the body in front of you.

Audio

Audio over the web is growing very fast. That's why many long distance providers have major investments in web telephony. NetMeeting has been used successfully for several years. Several kinds web telephone software have been created. Several companies are now producing stand-alone web phones.

In other words, audio over the web is getting real good and very reliable. My own personal experience has been that it was a little clunky to set up, but once I went through the hassles of making it work, it was fine.

Today companies like www.hearme.com are now taking much of that hassle away. I have just started to examine this company so my review of their offering will come later. But why wait for me! You can check it out yourself by going to their web page and downloading a trial version.

In the meantime, try some of the audio capabilities of some of the other services I discuss later. Whether or not you use the audio capabilities of these web conferencing packages or not will likely depend upon the following:

• Can you work with others who will attend your conference to make sure they can handle audio over the web effectively?
  
  Remember, if you lose audio over the web during a meeting, your meeting is over, or at least very much disrupted. If you are all on the phone, then you just lose "picture" for a moment or two. How critical is this meeting and how much loss of control can you stand?
  
  
• The cost of this choice is important.
  
  If you can do the conference with web audio the cost of the conference plummets to nearly zero! That's a lot of incentive to work out bugs and be flexible!

Sharing Your Desktop

Have you even been in this conversation while trying to help someone with their computer? "Yeah, no minimize the window. What? Oh yeah, click on the little thing dingy in the corner. What do you mean there's no thingy dingy. There has to be a thingy dingy!"

Anyone who has worked with someone over the phone on their computer knows how nice it would be if you could actually slip right through the phone lines and see the other person's computer screen. In many web conferencing applications you can do just that.

Early applications like PC AnyWhere have been around for a long time. They allow you to control computers remotely. But they require software to be purchased and installed. They require you to actually touch the other computer which means corporate firewalls will probably not allow it.

New methods such as Pixion's PictureTalk software will allow you to see the actual computer screen of the other person. You cannot control their computer. You can look but not touch. You can, however, turn on your "pointer" so that you can use your mouse to point to that thingy dingy they couldn't find. This would be incredibly helpful to any tech support program - personal or business.

Application Demonstrations

Since you can actually see the person's desktop with PictureTalk, you can easily see how any application works. Other services that do not allow you to see the person's computer screen can still show or share applications. "Showing" applications means you can look but not control the application. "Sharing" means they can actually work with the application tools, even if that software is not on their computer!

Polling, Whiteboarding, and more!

Many of the web conferencing services offer additional meeting services like the ability to ask your audience to respond to questions. Their responses appear immediately on the screen. "Whiteboarding" is the ability to use drawing tools to mark up things on the screen, add comments, etc. Chat features allow people to communicate with their keyboards to the presenter, and sometimes to other participants in private chat sessions. Often several at the same time! Talk about multi-tasking!!!

Speed

Speed makes nearly everything on the Web better. When it comes to web conferencing where interactivity and sharing lots of graphic images is its main function, speed is critical. In most cases you are only as fast as your slowest connection. So if everyone is using a dial-up 28.8 connection, your performance will be pretty lame at times. Still worth doing in many cases, but still aggravating. On the other hand, in many instances where you are working with smaller group of people or even one-on-one, you have a great possibility of having wonderful throughput. My cable modem and your DSL line will create some pretty impressive conferencing! So when you look to use web conferencing try to experiment with it under battle conditions before doing a critical demo.

Secondly, the various web conferencing have different levels of speed within their own systems and software. Another thing you must really check by trying it out. Most services allow you to test using the service in some way.

To Buy or to Rent?

So should you "rent" by using the web conferencing services using the service providers server and tech support? Or should you buy the software outright and put it on your own web site?

My suggestion is "rent to own." I would not recommend buying until you had used a service quite a bit to make sure you like the way it works, you get good tech support, and you have a critical mass of active users.

Make no mistake about it. Web conferencing is already here and is getting faster, more robust, and cheaper every day. You WILL be using it some day soon. Since many of these web conferencing services have free trials, what do you have to lose? Just go out and try it. In some case you will wonder how you ever did without it! Let us know how your explorations go!

(Bill Metcalf is a professional speaker and consultant who helps organizations overcome their limiting beliefs about technology that keep them stuck in 20th century thinking as they enter a 21st century of sweeping change. He can be reached at (708) 386 0536 or bill@technoshift.com)