Your company has to conduct business every day with people who live both near and far. For most midsize and larger companies, the vast majority of their day-to-day interactions with customers, partners and often even their own internal employees happen at a distance rather than face-to-face.

For most types of at-a-distance communication, the telephone more than suffices. The phone has been an essential business instrument for decades. There is one serious drawback with phone-based conferencing: the inability to express non-verbal communication – like facial expressions and gestures – which is such an important part of business interaction.

Of course, in addition to the telephone, many companies allow their employees to travel by ground, air, or even sea to meet their customers directly. However, the drawbacks to this alternative are obvious: the high cost and the inability to communicate “at the drop of a hat.”

A Company Conferencing Solution: The Web Conferencing Alternative

Web conferencing is a rather generic term that actually refers to a cluster of related technologies that individuals, companies and other organizations use to communicate over the Internet with each other in real time, inexpensively and at-a-distance.

In fact, not only does web conferencing merely overcome the limitations of telephone-based conferencing or travel, but it offers some additional benefits as well. For example, in web conferencing – depending upon the system – one has the ability to collaborate on projects (e.g., sharing a CAD application remotely), make text-based notes for later archiving & review, and sharing streaming video or other applications. Users can even share each others’ screens with a feature called desktop sharing.

A Huge Number of Providers in the Marketplace

There are a number of providers in the marketplace today who design, build, market and manage web conferencing solutions. Each system goes by a different name and product description, so there is no official list of all such providers.

The key is to find a system that is within your price range and has the features (both user features and security-related features) that you need. Providers generally build their systems for very different intended uses, although many or most of the systems can be used for a number of overlapping reasons.

Given that there is no single way to encapsulate all of these systems under a single, all-encompassing term, it is useful to get a handle on the various ways the systems can be used.

Choose Based Upon Your Intended Use

To get an idea of where you should be looking, here is a category-by-category breakdown of the major web conferencing system types available in the market today:

* Basic meeting: for simple desktop sharing and chat
* Customer support and remote access: used mainly by customer service or internal IT people to “take over” a user’s computer for the purposes of support
* Rich media sharing: ideal for media companies and creative individuals
* Education and training: made for conducting training sessions over the Internet
* Enterprise work collaboration: these systems are used to work on projects together among remotely-located participants
* Webcasting and webinars: for one-to-many presentations conducted on a large scale.

Leverage this guide as you look for a company conferencing solution.

Author Bio: Compare secure web conferencing services at: Secure Web Conferencing Advisor.

Category: Business Management
Keywords: Conference Call Service Provider ,7 Types of Web Conferencing Systems