Barry Sampson – Page 4 – Onlignment Archive

Virtual meetings as the first choice?

cc licensed flickr photo
Here in the UK the snow continues to fall, and yet another face to face meeting is cancelled. I had a quick chat with the other person involved and we’ve now arranged to hold the meeting at the same time as originally planned, but via Skype. Simple.
So why didn’t we just do that in the first place?
As someone professionally involved in virtual communication and collaboration, I regularly look for oportunities to do things online rather than in person, and yet it surprised me how many times in the past year I’d met with people face to face when maybe it could have happened virtually.
I think we tend to assume that certain types of meeting and event should happen in person, and as a result we don’t consider all the options.
Going forward I’ve resolved that for myself, virtual options will be the first I consider. That doesn’t mean I don’t intend to do anything in person (far from it), but where the inconvenience of travel, time and location outweigh the benefits of meeting in person I think it’s right to question doing it any other way.
What I’d really like to know is what you think.
Are there any particular circumstances when we shouldn’t even consider doing things virtually? I’m thinking about this in the context of meetings, interviews, training activites, conferences and any other event where the default behaviour is to do it face to face.
Similarly I’m thinking of the whole range of virtual solutions from VoIP to Telepresence, whatever is appropriate.
So why don’t we just consider doing things virtually as the first option?

Tandberg Shareholders Hold Out For More From Cisco

We recently reported on the news that Cisco had acquired Tandberg, the Norway based video communication business, but it seems they may decide to drop their bid.
Less than 10% of Tandberg’s shareholders accepted Cisco’s $3 billion offer. Cisco have now extended the deadline to 18th November, but have said that if its offer is not accepted by the required 90% of Tandberg’s shareholders, it will withdraw.
This may just be sabre rattling on both sides, but considering that the current offer is a premium of nearly 40% on the current share price, it’s a remarkable show of confidence by Tandberg’s shareholders.
Cisco CEO John Chambers has expressed confidence that the deal will go through, and has reminded Tandberg’s shareholders that they have already walked away from other deals this year where they couldn’t get the pricing right. Bearing in mind that one of the deals they walked away from was with LifeSize, recently acquired by Logitech, and that Tandberg has a 40% share of the video conferencing market, they may not find it so easy to walk away from this deal.

Logitech buys LifeSize

It was announced today that consumer peripherals maker Logitech has bought LifeSize, a video conferencing business based in Austin, Texas.
Logitech is one of the biggest players in the PC peripherals market, producing a wide range of webcams, headsets and microphones, as well as mice, keyboards, and music and gaming equipment.
This is definitely one to watch. If Logitech employs their consumer knowhow to make video conferencing a more affordable option, it has the potential to turn it into a more mainstream tool. Indeed, in their press release they suggest that it is their intention to make video communication as common as voice only communication.
The full press release can be read here.

Cisco Acquires Tandberg

Cisco today announced the acquisition of Tandberg, a Norwegian video communications company. Tandberg offer a range of hardware and software solutions from personal video conferencing through to high end Telepresence solutions, as well as network and content infrastructure tools and professional services.
According to their press release “This proposed acquisition would combine TANDBERG’s best-in-class telepresence and video conferencing portfolio with Cisco’s world-class collaboration architecture and network capabilities.”
This is a significant acquisition for Cisco, that clearly indicates a belief that there is a growing market for virtual communication technologies.

Virtual meetings in your pocket?

We all know that setting up the environment for virtual meetings or training sessions involves a commitment in terms of hardware, software or both. Or does it? Genius Room hope to persuade us otherwise, with the launch of their new PocketMeeting service.
desktop_sharing_step_3
The premise is pretty simple. You go to their website, enter your credit card details and for $5.00 you get 24 hours of access to your own screen sharing environment. It doesn’t feature voice or chat, or in fact anything other than screensharing, but that’s the beauty of it really. No big learning curve, no complex tool to remember, no vendor specific plug ins (although it does rely on you having Java installed).
If you occasionally have the need to share presentations or other desktop materials, and are happy to use conference calling or VoIP for the audio, PocketMeeting is certainly worth investigating.

The technology is ready. Are you?

I recently read this excellent post over on The Webinar Blog, considering some of the difficulties involved with the use of Voice over IP (VoIP). I would encourage you to read Ken’s post, and I agree with most of what he says in as much as they’re all real issues, but I can’t help feeling that the root of the problem isn’t being addressed.
None of the issues raised are really about VoIP itself, which is a relatively mature and very usable technology. Internet speeds are continually increasing, and the quality achievable with VoIP is at least as good as a regular telephone.
As is so often the case with technology solutions, the real issue is with the implementation. Too often, the implementation is considered a success once the software has been rolled out across the organisation. In fact this is when the real work should begin.
Employees must be provided with the right equipment; if you want to use VoIP, make sure they have good quality headsets. Ensure that every user knows how to set up and use that equipment. Despite what vendors tell you, none of the tools are so intuitive that people can be expected to use them without some support and training. Invest the time at this point to check that everything technical works, and I do mean everything. Set up a pre-recorded webinar and get every user to log in and make sure they can navigate through it and that their audio and video works. This is a much simpler thing to deal with if you plan for it and ramp up your helpdesk support for the testing period. It’s certainly easier than trying to deal with the issue on an ad-hoc basis once someone is supposed to be taking part in a live session.
Even with this much better level of implementation, it still pays to have a fallback for every session that is being run. If you’re using VoIP, always make sure there is an alternative conference call number available. When a problem does occur, you don’t want to waste valuable time trying to fix it if you can provide everyone with an alternative.
The tools are there to make communication easier, and they do work. Let’s make sure that we invest the time in making sure our people really have what they need to use the tools effectively.