virtual conferencing

[tgwht27]

Is virtual conferencing a good thing or a bad thing in the business industry today?

[bugatti29]

My two-penneth �
I'm based in the UK but my company's HQ is based in North America and has offices based all over the globe.  The company's AGM and other important announcements/meetings tend to be broadcast on the corporate intranet where items such as power points can be interacted with in real time. 

I also tend to work in distributed project teams. E.g. development team in one location and client/business design teams in another.  At present telephone conference calls are regularly used for combined project team meetings which generally only last 30mins-1hour (such as 'bug' review meetings) and where travelling to all of these would mean plenty of extra downtime and lack of productivity.

Generally we will be reviewing some kind of documentation such as a word document; spreadsheet or power point so the next step up would be to move to a virtual conferencing scenario where these types of artefacts can be reviewed on-line.

Having a video capability may also allowing you to better determine the �mood and atmosphere' in such meetings and also just in terms as simple as just seeing how many people are actually in a meeting (the danger with phone conference calls is that if you are not careful you might flame someone without realising they are actually there because they haven't spoken yet!).

In summary, virtual conference is an efficient and effective way for multinational corporations to communicate to their employees and also for distributed teams to work together more productively.