Posts Tagged ‘Room Participants’

Interactive Web Conferencing

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

As web conferencing has become more popular chances are that you have attended an online seminar where the presentation has been done via web conferencing.  Usually you are simply sitting in the audience on a conference call listening while watching the presentation on the web conference with little or no interaction with the speaker.  Although this is the most used method of web conferencing, the people who first came up with the idea had much bigger plans for web conferencing.

When web conferencing was first invented a lot of effort was made to make the service a collaborative tool where people could work on a document together from great distance.  This ability to collaborate was seen as the the killer application.  The adoption of web conferencing services is more and more widespread but interactive web conferencing is still lagging in its use overall.  Here are some of the features that allow for interactive web conferencing.

  • Application Sharing – Application sharing provides users the ability to share their desktop with the other participants on the web conference and permits any participant to control another computer.  This means that participants can actually control a document or spreadsheet and input or edit data on it.  Much like you would pass around a piece of paper in an in person meeting for people to mark up, you can actually change the document on the fly while on the web conference.
  • Whiteboarding- This application permits participants to mark up a virtual whiteboard seen by all participants while on an interactive web conference.  Much like someone would go up to a whiteboard to discuss things while in a conference room, participants can easily do the same on the web conference.
  • Polling/Q&A – Even a presentation can be an interactive web conference through the use of polling and Q&A features.  By engaging the audience you will have a more stimulating meeting and have better retention of the material.  Polling permits you to survey your audience during an interactive web conference and the Q&A feature allows you to conduct an orderly Q&A session for the presentation.

It seems that maybe people don’t work in a collaborative manner and allowing someone to control your PC is a little scary to some people as well.  But even if you are only doing a presentation using a web conferencing service you can make it an interactive web conference by adding polling and Q&A to your web conference.  You will find that the more you can make it an interactive web conference the more your participants will stay engaged with your presentation.

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Conference Call Telephones

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

One of the best reasons to use a conference call service instead of trying to do it yourself is the quality of the connections.  A conference call service company uses equipment that provides full duplex transmission between all of the parties on the conference call.  That means that more than one person can talk at the same time and all of the voices will be heard equally the same across the conference call.  It is just like being in the same room together.  What people experience when they are on a conference call, however, may not be the same thing.  That is because many times the terminal equipment or telephone the participants are using are not full duplex.  So you see, the conference call is only as good as the telephones that are connected to it.

For many years there have been a handful of manufacturers of high end telephone equipment that uses similar technology as conference call equipment and provides a full duplex transmission through the speakerphone.  If you have ever been in a conference room you have probably noticed one of these funny shaped telephones sitting on the conference table.  The telephone is designed to pick up voices from around the conference table so many times they have a triangular or star shape to them.  And sometimes the conference speakerphone has been installed in such a manner to allow a separate microphone at each station at the table to allow individual participants to mute themselves at their seat.  The main mission of these funny looking telephones is to provide a full duplex speakerphone for the conference room.  That way the participants who connect to the conference call can hear everyone in the conference room and the conference room participants can talk freely without interruption and converse with conference call participants just like they are in the room together.

Without a full duplex speakerphone, once a participant has taken the talk path no one else can talk until that person stops talking.  This can make for a very frustrating experience on a conference call.  If you are unable to add discussion points while someone is talking the whole concept of being able to interact at a distance using a conference call has been lost.

There are a number of manufacturers of these types of telephones.  The one manufacturer that everyone is familiar with is the Polycom.  They were the first to develop and manufacturer this type of specialized conference call phone and have become the Kleenex of the full duplex speakerphone.  Many times people will simply refer to the telephone as a Polycom regardless of the manufacturer.  As long you make sure that the speakerphone has full duplex capabilities you will have a good experience using a speakerphone for your conference calls.

www.zipconferencing.com

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