Business travel is expensive. It is not just the air fares, it is the time taken to bring everyone to one place for a meeting. Transatlantic flights can chop days from a working week, with check-in times and travel to and from airports. Even a high-speed rail journey to London and back from Reading can fill much of a working day.
Airlines and rail operators are trying to make it easy for business travellers to work on the go, with laptop power points and wireless internet connections, but it is still time better spent in the office or with clients. One increasingly popular alternative is using web and internet tools to share meetings or presentations, without leaving a desk.
It all starts with sharing presentations with remote colleagues. Features built into common presentation tools such as Microsoft's PowerPoint will save a presentation image as HTML for the web, or bundle them with standalone viewers. You can use tools that plug into PowerPoint and turn your presentations into movies with soundtracks and animations. You can even convert presentations into Macromedia's Flash format - reducing file sizes and taking advantage of Flash's cross platform nature. Some Flash converters, such as eHelp's RoboPresenter, allow you to add audio to your presentations, and can also offer links to e-learning systems.
Macromedia's Breeze Live started life as a tool for building and managing training over the web, and grew into a tool for broadcasting presentations and handling live meetings, with video, audio and online chat. You can run your own Breeze server, or buy into Macromedia's managed service. By building on top of the near-ubiquitous Flash, Breeze means that presentations can be viewed on most platforms, and Flash's vector graphics mean that presentations and shared screens will scale smoothly on most desktops. A "pod" API also gives Flash developers tools for extending Breeze, adding their own features to the service.
Probably the best known tools for handling meetings over the web are WebEx and PlaceWare (now Microsoft's Office Live Meeting service). These are services that allow companies to broadcast presentations as online seminars (often called webinars), or hold small meetings over the net. Desktop content and applications can be shared, and users can access recorded meetings if unable to attend. You can annotate recordings, and add links to extra materials, as well as upload and download files from users' PCs.
WebEx refers to its content distribution network as media tone, which allows any PC to download a simple client, and plug into presentations or meetings. Describing itself as a communications service provider, WebEx offers a range of services, from pay per use conferences to subscription microsites, which allow companies to use their own branding and run conferences when they want. Support staff can use online meetings to show users what needs to be done - taking control of a PC and walking them through procedures.
Team collaboration is becoming more important, especially when several people need to work on a single document. Lawyers will need to be able to share files, and work on the same document, without having to pass it around via email for approval. Citrix has extended its familiar MetaFrame platform with Conferencing Manager, to give teams the ability to collaborate in real time. Keyboard and mouse controls can be passed between users. As Conferencing Manager is built on top of the MetaFrame architecture, all the applications and data are centrally held, keeping it secure enough to use in a cyber cafe.
Scheduling meetings can be a problem, and Citrix's Conferencing Manager links into Microsoft's Outlook to help you gather distributed teams together. There's no speech or video, though, apart from a basic peer-to-peer messaging feature, so you'll have to use it in conjunction with a good old conference call!
WebEx's service model works well for webinars and ad hoc conferences. Larger events need a mix of broadcasting skills and event management, moving into the world of streaming media. BT's Mediastream service extends existing business television networks, seeing online conferencing as an extension of existing communications strategies. You probably would not use online meeting tools to broadcast a ship launch. Instead, you would take advantage of a service such as BT's to record the event,encode it in real time, and then manage a streaming broadcast - as well as archive it.
On a smaller scale, UK start-up Bright Talk is using web meeting and conferencing techniques in conjunction with streaming media and content-distribution technologies. Briefings and short conferences are complex events that demand attendees' time. A webcast with an encoded presentation is much less invasive, and can be watched without leaving the office. An hour presentation takes an hour, and tools for commenting mean that it's easier for the audience to take part. Bright Talk's co-founder, Charlie Blackburn, described the service as "bringing a web presence to life", by focusing on a direct connection to attendees, rather than static content. Certainly, results seem good: a recent web cast seminar received one question over a telephone conference call, for every eight received over the online service.
Online meeting tools are still relatively new, but show promise. As lives get increasingly time-poor, they are tools that will help the work/life balance. Instead of rushing from meeting to meeting, we will be able to work from home, the office - even a Wi-Fi-ready coffee shop. There will always be a place for the face-to-face meeting. Web meeting tools will help us stay in touch with the office while we're on the way to that important meeting that needs the human touch.
