Make your meeting--from anywhere
Avoid the scenario that many companies have faced--a Web conferencing system collecting dust--by being prepared to change how people communicate. To keep your virtual meetings from running amuck, you need an effective moderator. And your moderator will need the right tools.
Howard Millman, a writer and computer technology consultant based in Croton, New York, contributes regularly to ZDNet Tech Update and helps make computers behave.The good news is that Web conferencing products from application service providers (ASPs) such as WebEx, PlaceWare, Astound, and DigitalSpace--which offers some dramatic 3D effects in its virtual meetings--are reliable, secure, scalable, and affordable. Costs range from $10 to $30 per user, per hour. Some services, such as WebEx, charge by the minute.
Other service providers offer a fixed monthly fee based on the number of seats or total usage. Generally, fixed-fee plans provide more, and sometimes even unlimited, usage. You can expect to pay anywhere from $500 to $2,000 per month for about 50 seats (about $10 to $40 per user), which is still a whole lot cheaper than a room at the Marriott. Beyond 50 or so users, it may be less expensive to purchase a system and deploy it on your network.
Using an ASP has one distinct advantage over purchasing software: you don't pay up-front to use the service. An ASP also minimizes the likelihood of incompatible software, because the application is mounted on a remote server. What's more, the ASP assumes full responsibility for the upkeep of the application at its site. Before you sign a service agreement, you should take a test-drive with one of the free trials that most vendors offer.
The primary disadvantage of an ASP is that you have to send sensitive data and discussions outside your intranet. In addition, overall performance may be slower, especially for remote users who may be using dial-up access. Encrypting and encapsulating data could drag down performance even more.
Software products
Software products cost anywhere from a few hundred dollars to many thousands of dollars, depending on the number of users and features. Usage is free as long as you use your own point-to-point tunneling, encryption, or encapsulation processes. You tend to get what you pay for. For example, Microsoft's free NetMeeting utility, bundled with Windows, is best suited for teens who exchange grainy pictures with one another. That's because NetMeeting is slow, crashes some firewalls, and gets hung up in others.
Lotus Sametime and Microsoft Exchange 2000 Conferencing Server both offer a full range of conferencing tools such as application sharing, whiteboarding/annotation, audio (voice-over-IP or telephone), video, chat (public and private), information on attendees, anonymous voting, and tool-availability control for moderators. Lotus prices Sametime at $27 per seat, with volume discounts available. Microsoft Exchange Server 2000 costs about $4,000, plus a per-seat cost of $67, and requires Microsoft Exchange, which also costs about $4,000.For the money, you get an affordable communication conduit that, as long as you take proper precautions, will allow you to communicate securely with colleagues, partners, and customers.
The security precautions that you need to take are about the same with ASPs and in-house systems, provided that participants follow minimal security guidelines, such as not letting the application save passwords and not writing down passwords at their desks.
Security could be a greater concern if you use your in-house system to communicate with key partners and customers beyond the firewall. In that extended extranet configuration, you would want to create a virtual private network over leased lines or use tunneling, encryption, or encapsulation to protect sensitive data. ASPs are somewhat better equipped for remote collaboration, since that is the basis of their service model.
Scalability is a relatively minor concern with either ASPs or packaged software. Most services and software products offer practically unlimited capacity for simultaneous conferences as well as for the number of participants. For example, PlaceWare Web Conferencing hosts an unlimited number of conferences, with up to 2,500 participants. Soft Bicycle claims that its Consensus AnyWare hosted service can handle an unlimited number of simultaneous discussions and users. Scalability is ordinarily not an issue unless you use the application to broadcast a message to thousands of people.
Considering the surprisingly similar features of ASPs and packaged software, you should choose an application based on the kind of interaction you expect between the moderator and the other attendees. For example, if you intend to use the application for multipoint team building, information sharing, and problem solving, you want an application that offers annotation, calendaring, and schedule management. The latter two features will help moderators schedule the time for the meetings, verify the availability of the participants, and create an agenda.
If your model involves a passive audience, for example, when making a presentation to a client or colleagues, you need simpler tools such as public or private text chat or an instant messenger and perhaps file transfer.
That's the conferencing model of Liggett-Stashower, a Cleveland, Ohio-based advertising agency that uses Lotus Sametime to communicate with its clients. Laura Jenson, vice president of information systems, acknowledges that it took time for her company to maximize its success with Sametime and to save the anticipated time and money. "Online collaboration is very different than real-world meetings. Online you must be fully prepared and organized," she advises. "Have all your files available and let the moderators decide how to run the meeting. Never force the technology on anyone. Let them come to it in their own time."When Web conferencing systems don't reach their full potential, it's likely because the participants aren't sharing information, not because the technology has failed.
According to the experts, communicating online both improves and depersonalizes communication. Take e-mail; it's a killer app because it's easy to use. But studies also show that people use it to avoid speaking with someone, especially if the message is in any way unpleasant.
"The vast majority of virtual communication projects I have studied follow a definite pattern," says Tom Sudman, CEO of Knoxville, Tennessee-based DigitalAV, a consulting firm that specializes in virtual business processes. "In the first 30 to 45 days, the team members share a great degree of excitement and a heightened commitment to the technology and the project. After 60 days, you will see the participants gradually starting to lose interest in joining the conversations." Around three months after the team is formed, says Sudman, most people stop responding to calls for meetings and the system becomes more of a relic than a productivity tool.
But with a better understanding of some potential pitfalls, you can increase the odds of success for your online collaboration initiative.
"Make online conversations similar to and as natural as real-world conversations, only more efficient," says Steve Londergan, Lotus Sametime's technical manager. "Keep things moving to maintain the interest, take advantage of all of the technology's visual and multimedia features such as audio, images, video, even music."
To counteract the tendency of some members to commandeer the meeting, Londergan recommends that companies develop a manual outlining expected and inappropriate online behavior.
The solution is not to try to quell intellectual conflict but to manage it. That requires a full-time moderator so that online discussions stay on course and don't overburden the network. You should strive to use a single moderator. Large meetings with considerable interaction might require two.One way a moderator can keep the data flowing is by limiting the bandwidth used by individual users. For example, the moderator (who controls the availability of features) can offer video and higher-quality audio to key executives and limit other participants to lower-quality transmissions and fewer features.
For a moderator to make a Web conference a cooperative exchange of quality knowledge, he or she must overcome two primary obstacles, according to Mary Boone, author of Interactive Management and president of the management consulting firm, Boone Associates in Norwalk, Connecticut.
"The number one issue is recognizing that people resist change," says Boone. "You need to make it clear at a visceral level how the technology you have adopted will help the users to achieve their own, and the project's, goals sooner."
Boone says you have to rethink what makes online communication work. "Start out by thinking not about what you want to say, but its effect on the other participants in the virtual meeting. For example, don't burden the other team members by sending broadcast messages." She implies that others will recognize it as a self-serving tactic that diminishes the value of the meeting.
Here, too, technology has the answers, and it's up to the moderator to apply them. The key is using personalization to make all participants part of the collaborative process. Text chats can encourage reticent employees to speak their mind. Chat, sometimes called instant messaging or pop-up messaging, can be broadcast to all attendees or directed to specific participants.
With these tools, you can create affordable online collaboration. After learning how best to do it, the rest is comparatively simple, says Sudman. In most cases, he says, you'll end up with better collaboration than occurs in actual meetings. If you can keep people interested, develop effective procedures, and assign an efficient moderator, you can prove him right.