Conferencing

With IP as your foundation and the growing trend to ‘virtualize’ the capability to host conferences, whether audio, data (that is Web), or video, becomes much easier and more powerful. Although the concept of collaboration has been around for many years, we can now add much more of a Jetsons flavour to what’s possible. Conference bridges can be used for meetings, presentations, internal or external training or real-time working sessions. You can purchase conferencing solutions as ‘pay as you use’ service or you can buy them outright to integrate with your existing network and applications. Videoconferencing can help you save on travel expenses and may also boost productivity by letting your staff collaborate on a live document and share data in real time over an IP connection.

Many of you will remember business trips for the purpose of attending group meetings. Teleconferencing, videoconferencing and web-based conferencing are reducing the need for people to meet in conference rooms face to face. In other words, the cost of business travel for the sake of meeting others is becoming harder to justify. Emerging communications technologies continue to drive this trend.

Unified communications makes conferencing work for users employing whatever technologies they have available at the time. So if a web-based conference is scheduled and one of the attendees is on a mobile device, he or she might be able to receive documents and low-res images or at least get the voice portion of the conference. SIP-enabled conferencing services can work with whatever people have available when they join.