Phone Conferences Via Web Conferencing: Pre-Screening Questions
By Roy Copeland
The decision to select a teleconferencing system should be made by the big wigs of the organization and not merely by the chief technology officer for instance. This will be a decision that will impact everyone within your organization. Therefore, it needs to have some strategic backing behind it, otherwise it will be just another useless tool sitting in a dusty corner gathering dust and mold and being taken for granted for what it's truly worth.
A few basic question you should ask is, what you hope to be accomplishing within these teleconferencing sessions? For instance, would you like to be able to share documents and manipulate them in real time almost like in a classroom session? This will be called a graphic audio setup, where essentially you'll have verbal communications as well as visual white board or blackboard type communications which are auxiliary tools that will help you to communicate a point across to a larger group, much more clearly. Sometimes a picture is definitely worth at least a thousand words.
On the other side of the coin, would you rather instead of having these dynamic images on the screen while talking out loud, would you like to actually see the person you're talking to and vice versa? Would you like to have some hand motions and incorporate body language and facial expressions to enrich and enhance the overall experience of the conference call? If you are pursuing more than those two components, you are seeking a conference solution that contains a mixture if audio and video features.