Web meetings or web conferences are saving a lot of business people time and money. Although real meetings are always better than virtual ones, the trade off is more than worth it considering the amount of travel costs and time that are saved. These days, web conferencing programs are getting more nice features, with most having some type of desktop/document sharing ability, video, and sound.
Web conferencing programs are also getting easier and easier to use, which is important considering that many member participants will be using the program for the first time at one point or another. Pretty much all web meeting solutions make your pay more if you want more people to join a meeting. Fees for a typical web meeting (whose highlight is its desktop sharing capability) are around $50 for a months use.
Gotomeeting and Webex are the two most popular web meeting solutions, although Webex is slightly more popular. Although you have to pay more if you use Webex, you also get to have 10 more users in each meeting that you have (25 vs. 15). Because you pay per month, rather than per user, you can use them as often as you want.
A web conferencing program can be fun and entertaining to use. However, you should buy it with a break even point in the back of your mind. Will the $500 yearly cost pay for itself in travel expenses and opportunity cost? Can you get by, just by using free options such as Skype web conferencing or Yugma?
When shopping around for a web conferencing tool you also want to find out if it is easy enough to set up for users. Some web meeting programs can be used from any browser.
In the end, what web meeting program you utilize depends on what you need. If you need to show clients a lot of detailed video files, Fuze Meeting is worth a look because it specializes in sharing files or documents with a high quality format. If you desire many nice features, Microsoft Live Meeting is worth looking into. If you want to communicate with only several clients without sharing files, Skype would be a good option.
Jeremy is the author of Web Conferencing Features and Interactive Web Meeting.
