One way to maintain "face time" in business without incurring outrageous travel expenses is to use technology to bring people together, even when they're widely dispersed, with video conferencing.
With fuel prices through the roof, it's becoming increasingly cost prohibitive to fly colleagues in from remote offices for "in person" meetings. More and more business is being handled via phone calls, e-mail, and instant messaging, but these methods of communications can leave a lot to be desired, especially for groups of more than two or three people.
Voice-only conference calls can be confusing, since it's often difficult to recognise who's talking. There's often a lag time with e-mail, and some persons on the cc: list may not check their mail often or may forget to copy everyone on their responses. Text IM offers "real time" interaction but conversational threads can be difficult to follow with several people sending input simultaneously.
More importantly, according to many psychologists who specialise in human communications, anywhere from 65 to 95 percent of our communication is non-verbal -- we express our meanings not just (or even mostly) through our words, but with facial expressions and body language.
The problem is that most of today's businesses deal with people outside their local geographic area. One way to maintain "face time" without incurring outrageous travel expenses is to use technology to bring people together even when they're widely dispersed. Video conferencing, real-time two-way digital transmission of video and audio signals sent simultaneously to multiple locations, is finally coming into its own. And as your organisation grows (especially if your budget shrinks or remains static), you're more likely to need to incorporate video conferencing in your network's functionality.
Video conferencing requirements
The first step in planning a video conferencing solution is to analyse the organisation's needs. Some questions you need to answer include:
- What quality does the video transmission need to be? Will you be just looking at faces, or will you also be watching demonstrations, whiteboard presentations, and such across the video link?
- What are the bandwidth capabilities of all locations that will be involved in the video conferencing?
- How many people will typically participate in a conference?
- Do you need extra features such as the ability to view others' computer screens (for example, for a PowerPoint presentation), download files, present drawings and photos on screen to the group, poll participants, show virtual "seating arrangements" and so forth?
- Do you prefer to conference via a Web browser or through proprietary software?
- Do participants need to be able to join the conference using different operating system platforms?
- Do participants need to be able to connect from handheld devices over mobile networks such as 3G?
- How secure do your meetings need to be?
- What is your budget for video conferencing software, hardware, and/or services?
If you have the answers to these questions in mind as you shop for video conferencing solutions, you can quickly sort through the feature sets of different products to zero in on those that best serve your needs.
