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Gone are the days the way employees, organizations and individual business owners used to organize the meetings with the colleagues, suppliers, partners and customers where everybody involved must be gathered at some place and discuss. Until recently in order to organize or attend a meeting online, we need to go through complex, lengthy and often not-so-easy-to-use software.

With the increased use of internet, lot of businesses and professionals are finding the Web meetings useful for many reasons. A web meeting software is used to organize the meetings online with capabilities of sharing the desktop of the computer, sharing the documents, presentations and interactions between the participants. There are lot of advantages of using these tools like:   

1. It will allow the participants to participate in the meetings remotely irrespective of the location. You only need to have a computer and internet connection. That’s it.

2. It will allow the employees of an organization to work from home or other remote locations. Due to increase in the interest for work-from-home concept, this technology is a must for home-based business owners and companies that allow the employees to work from home.

3. The above point enables the organizations to hire the top talent who are interested to work from home.

4. It reduces the travel and its associated costs and thus will be more environment friendly as the participants do not need to travel to attend a meeting or to work.

5. The web conferencing software does not involve any software downloading and installing and thus very simple to organize and participate in an online meeting.

These tools can be used for many purposes like organizing a Sales meeting, Product training demonstrations, online collaboration with others, trouble shooting the problems facing by the customers, for web seminars, also called as Webinars in short, Online tutorials and training, live meeting,etc.

Let us now see the capabilities a web conferencing tool can provide typically: 

1.   Ease of use: The tool need to be easy to setup and use without complex and lengthy installations. Most of the products provide a one-click meeting capability which means one can start a meeting with one click of the mouse.

2.   Number of hosts: Some products offer the ability to have multiple hosts for the meeting, others only one. Decide what your need is.

3.   Number of attendees: This feature limits the number of people who can attend the meeting at one time. It includes the host(s) also.

4.   Desktop and Application sharing: This feature enables the participants to share their desktops and applications on the PC. This will be very useful if you want to show the participants some tutorials and presentations that others can follow within the online meeting.

5.   Share keyboard and mouse control: Allows the hosts to share the keyboard of their pc and transfer the mouse control to other attendees or hosts.

6.   Chat: Allows the participants to have text and voice chat in the meeting.

7.   Security: This feature ensures the meeting has been conducted securely without allowing non-participants to attend the meeting or access the meeting material unauthorized. A SSL encryption feature is recommended to ensure a secure environment for communication and collaboration. This is an important feature for webinar hosting.

8.   Reporting: This feature provides a reporting ability giving the valuable information about the participant details, number of them attended, location details,etc.

9.   Recording and playback: This will allow to record the meeting minutes for future reference and sharing it with the participants after the meeting.

10.   Interactive capability: This will allow the participants to interact in real-time with other participants of the webinar like asking questions by raising the hand adjacent to their name, allowing others to speak, etc.

11.   Multiple monitor support: This will help the host to share a desktop of one pc and work on other while hosting the meeting i.e., multi-tasking.

12.   Drawing tools: This will help the host or participants to highlight an item or a portion on their desktops which will help to have a meeting more interactive and lively.

13.   Polling or survey: This will enable to arrange polling or do asurvey among the participants of the meeting on an issue related to the meeting or as a feedback.

14.   File transfer: This feature enables to transfer the files between the participants during the meeting. Do not confuse with document sharing feature discussed above. In the document sharing, the file will not be available on other’s PC but can just see it only.

15.   Integration with VoIP services: Integration with Voice over Internet Telephony (VoIP) services like Skype enable one to communicate with other participants irrespective of their locations cheaply.

There are number of tools available in the market and it is sometimes confusing to find the right one for your needs. Among all, two of them are most popular and I will here review these two as these two are the ones I have used and comfortable with.

1. WebEx:I use this product since long time and I have to say that I am very satisfied with it. It is easy to use and provides very good features for all kinds of users whether they may be individuals, Small and medium businesses or large corporations. The company boasts itself as a world leader in web conferencing and is used by many large corporations. The strongest points of this product are easy to use, rich features and integration with wide variety of applications running on your computers. The service falls under Software as a Service(SaaS) offering.

It has wide variety of products including per-use-basis product. With this kind of product there is no minimum cost, no monthly commitment and you pay as you use it. It will very helpful for small and medium businesses. It has two products which are very useful:

   i.MeetMeNow: This makes real-time web meetings easy and affordable. The good points about this product are easy to use, no setup of software (web-based), good support and service,desktop sharing.

   ii.PCNow:You can access your PC or Mac from remote computer or a mobile device. It also provides free 5GB of online backup file space where you can store your files and other important data and access the same from another pc remotely without even connected to your pc. You can share files, presentations and other material with your colleagues and other people hassle free.

2. GoTo Meeting:I have seen this product in action recently. This tool is provided by Citrix Online Company. This is a well known company providing a wide variety of products and solutions to online users. The company provides three varieties of web meeting products.

  i. GoToMeeting: This is a basic product allowing meetings with and one host and up to 15 attendees only. It provides basic features like Desktop and file sharing, Drawing tools, meeting recording and playback, sharing control of your monitor and mouse with others.  It does not provide many advanced and very useful features like Polling and survey capabilities, Dashboard, Reporting, central administration, participants administration, etc. This will be useful for small and home-based businesses as the advanced features are seldom used in their day-to-day businesses. Also these can be used by the individuals for net meetings with colleagues and friends. 

  ii. GoToWebinar: This allows meetings with one host and up to 1000 attendees, provides some advanced features in addition to the basic ones provided by the above product. I felt this product will be sufficient by most small and medium businesses providing all the advanced features helpful to do their businesses efficiently.

  iii.GoToMeeting Corporate:As the name implies this product is for big companies with multiple products and large number of employees, customers and partners. It will allow multiple hosts and up to 25 attendees. It provides all the basic and advanced features like Group management, detailed usage reports, Recorded webinar storage and playback, etc. For more details click here.