Sunday May 20 , 2012
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Web conferencing

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Common features found in  Web Conferencing software  may be:

  • Presentations .
  • Live video streaming between participants (via webcam or digital video camera)
  • VoIP, or other method of talking to each other (using the computer, phone, etc.)
  • Web tours - where URLs, data from forms, cookies, scripts and session data can be pushed to other participants enabling them to be pushed though web based logons, clicks, etc.
  • Recording of meetings and sessions.
  • Whiteboard with annotation (allowing the presenter and/or attendees to highlight or mark items on the slide presentation. Or, simply make notes on a blank whiteboard.)
  • Text Chat- For live question and answer sessions, limited to the people connected to the meeting. Text chat may be public (for all participants) or private (between 2 participants).
  • Polls and surveys (allows the presenter to conduct questions with multiple choice answers directed to the audience)
  • Screen sharing/desktop sharing/application sharing (where participants can view anything the presenter currently has shown on their screen. Some screen sharing applications allow for remote desktop control, allowing participants to manipulate the presenters screen, although this is not widely used.)

 

Web conferencing is often sold as a service, hosted on a web server controlled by the vendor, either on a usage basis (cost per user per minute) or for a fixed fee (cost per "seat"). Some vendors make their conferencing software available as a licensed product, allowing organizations that make heavy use of conferencing to install the software on their own servers.

An important capability of web conferencing software is application sharing, the ability for one party in the conference to share an application (such as a web browser, spread sheet, etc.) from their desk top with everyone else in the meeting and pass the control of the application to someone else in the meeting.

The largest market share is held by webex.com, a Cisco company, and Microsoft office Live meeting.

Other major players are Adobe Connect, and Saba Centra.

The above conferencing suits are good in different aspects of conferencing, but they lack the content management capabilities of modern CMS, they don't have high level LMS capabilities (except Saba Centra, which is very expansive). If we take webex as example, the amount of manual work required to accomplish common LMS tasks is so large, that it makes it impractical solution. For example, in the way Webex is built, taking a school time table and converting all classes to online meeting with students and professors as participants is simply impossible. You have to manually create every meeting and manually invite all the users.

Published in Understanding the tech language
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Social sharing

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