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The next best thing to being there, videoconferencing simulates face-to-face meetings where participants interact visually as well as verbally from their personal computers. No longer the exclusive domain of executives who can afford the half-million-dollar conference room systems and sky-high phone bills for special lines, videoconferencing is now available to anyone with a networked PC and a couple thousand dollars (or less). Desktop videoconferencing lets you see and talk to people right where they work--their desks, the shop, or out in the field.
LESS TRAVEL, MORE CONFIDENCE
When you need to work with members of your team, you typically pick up the phone, send a fax, arrange a meeting, or transfer an e-mail message. Each of these alternatives is fraught with significant limitations: Lack of visual feedback, non-interactive, or long lead times. The biggest problem is that you end up spending too much time talking about work instead of actually doing the work together.
"I get no feedback or visual cues from a phone conversation," complains Glenn Norem, president and CEO of Viewpoint Systems (Dallas, TX), explaining why he can't just reach out and touch his team with a standard business call. "When I'm talking to my sales manager, I want to look at that guy's eyes when I ask him if he's going to hit quota. I used to climb on an airplane when I wanted to walk away with assurance that my district sales managers were going to deliver." Now that he uses desktop videoconferencing, the CEO travels less, yet has more confidence about the success (or failure) of a meeting.
Videoconferencing is especially useful for sharing visual and time-sensitive Information. "I'll use it as much as half a dozen times a week to do market reviews with managers across the country," says a marketing vice-president. "We display a great deal of financial information in the form of tables and pie charts that you couldn't use over the phone. Videoconferencing is a nice alternative between the telephone and the airplanes."
Another benefit of videoconferencing is that it eases the problem of language differences. "In our business, we're very globalized, having customers and engineers in various locations around the world," explains another videoconferencing proponent in an engineering consulting firm. "The ability to communicate...