Sunday, January 22, 2012
Five Best Online Meeting Services
Lifehacker: If you work at a company with employees in offices around the globe, or you work in a small company but want to collaborate with a contractor who works from home or vendor across the country, you need a service that will let you connect with your team, share documents, collaborate on them, and in some cases even share your screen or webcam with them. Here are five of the best services to conduct productive online meetings, based on your nominations.
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3 comments:
This brings up to me the question of proprietary or open source. The descriptions given by this article seem to make the Cisco product the most legitimate option and it is scalable to fit the application. Many of these products would be wonderful tools to use in design and budgeting phases with out of town designers and directors. The direct file sharing and integration with scheduling software seems to me to make the Cisco product easier but the mobile component to GoToMeetings seems to have a major leg up in this on the go environment we find ourselves in.
So the free software is great for small productions though lacks the file-sharing components of Cisco or the other pay-to-use. Supplementing these with dropbox or the like is a way to compensate for this. The only one I don't see that I think should be on the list here is Skype. We use it for interviews here and only one of teh part members has to pay to use group chat. It is also mobile compatible and has the advantage of being offered in a number of languages since one of it's primary goals was to connect people internationally for less money. With the exception of email integration on Google+ (if you use gmail), Skype is probably a stronger candidate.
Most of these seem like legitimate candidates, with the possible exception of Google+Hangouts. I am a die hard fan of Google, GMail, Google +, search engine, I believe it beats out other companies which attempt to serve the same function. However, Google tends to be unfriendly to those who are not linked up to its systems through GMail or otherwise. Sources that are going to be suggested as meeting places for clients and business partners across the world should be compatible with more than one login source. I do like that free options are suggested, as some smaller businesses are not going to be willing to pay for a meeting service. As Meg mentioned, it is surprising to not see Skype on the list - as it is the one of the oldest and possibly most famous video chatting system.
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