Web Conferencing Services - Know The Popular Types

By Author: Hope Dever
Total Articles: 42
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Government organizations, companies, NGOs and entrepreneurs these days need a cost-effective option to interact efficiently and lively with people at distant locations. Audio and video conference call is making it possible for them to communicate in real time and reduce complications in the connectivity between people who neither live nor work near each other.


One of the best available solutions for this communication problem is that of telephone and, more frequently, web-enabled conferencing services. Phone-based conference call is restricted to voice communication, while web conferencing adds many useful features to the communication procedure. Whether you are looking for the most convenient option for conferencing services or just want to make a fair comparison of all the popular options, you need to have a proper idea about various types of web conferencing.


For beginners, there are numerous web conferencing services providers available in the market today, each giving call programs with a completely different set of features ...
... with a few basic ones. To help you get a better idea about the world of web conferencing, here are discussed some of the most commonly used varieties - that are categorized by their area of application.


Regular business meetings:


If you are interested to know about conference call systems that can help you perform regular business meetings using telephone and allowing you screen-sharing options (Where all the remote users can see the host’s monitor on their individual screens), then a simple meeting conference program will be ideal. Call systems like Tokbox Meeting, Fuze Meeting, GoToMeeting (Citrix), Microsoft Office Live Meeting, and WebEx programs are already available in the market.


Enterprise level collaboration:


Some medium to large sized businesses want their employees to work collaboratively on the same project from long distances. It requires annotation, application sharing, and other interactive features (in addition to voice and video). You can have what you want through conference programs: Oracle Beehive, Genesys Meeting Center, ShowDocument, IBM Lotus Sametime, Adobe Acrobat Connect and TimeBridge.


Large-scale webcasting:


If you need conferencing services to address to a large number of people across the nation, such as organizing extensive sales seminar online, you can take advantage of any of the following systems: GoToWebinar and TalkPoint.


Rich multimedia sharing:


If you are in a creative field such as music, film or art where the multi-media is a necessity, you can consider using a call system that is exclusively made for supporting rich media applications. You need to look into OmNovia and Dimdim web conferencing technologies.


Training and education:


You may want to train a lot of people who need to connect from remote locations or, you may be managing an educational institution that needs to connect to more students with educational courses and materials. You can consider trying out any of these systems: Openmeetings, Elluminate, and WebTrain.


Customer care:


Some conferencing services are meant for providing constant support to employees or clients of a company or organization who are based at remote locations. The conference systems like Netviewer or Glance work best for such purpose.


Hope Dever is a technical consultant offering guidance to users in conferencing services and solutions. He emphasizes on comparing conference call standards and packages before recommending them to users.