| Your alarm goes off on a Monday morning, but you crawl back under the covers. It's hard to get excited about work when your calendar is filled with meetings. First you have the requisite 9 a.m. Monday meeting. And then you have to meet with a client downtown on Tuesday. Next, there's the red eye Thursday to meet with the L.A. office on Friday. You feel that you spend more time at meetings than actually doing work. Indeed, work often suffers when you have to dart in and out of the office to meet with clients or coworkers.
But, what if you could take advantage of technology to revamp the way you conduct meetings? Now there's an easy way to do just that.
Online meetings have been around for some time, though traditional services like WebEx, PlaceWare and others are geared to larger businesses. Recently, simpler and more streamlined services have become available. Thanks to innovative features and more affordable pricing that make online meetings practical for everyday use, this technology is now within easy reach of individuals, home office workers and small businesses.
Online meetings have opened the door to new options for getting more done while saving time, money and cutting back on travel hassles.
Patricia Pomerleau, CEO of CEOExpress Company, an online business service, says she holds online meetings on a daily basis, providing her business with more efficiency, higher sales and savings on travel. "I'm working more efficiently and have saved at least $3,000 in travel costs in the last four months alone," Pomerleau says. "I can hold online meetings from my PC in a way that's fast, easy, and secure. And, buyers of my software are always impressed by the quality of my presentations."
Scott Nissenson was pleased to find that you don't have to be a techie to take advantage of online meetings. The northeast regional manager of MDSpro, a software company based in Anchorage, Alaska, says, "My customers don't need to be tech savvy to participate. They simply click the link in a meeting invitation I've sent, or visit the GoToMeeting Web site to access my online meeting."
For Pomerleau, Nissenson, and others, Citrix GoToMeeting (www.gotomeeting.com) makes it a cinch to collaborate on documents using only your PC and a Web browser. So they can show PowerPoint slides, financial, spreadsheets, Word documents, photos and anything that's on their desktop -- to up to 10 people in other locations. When you hold an online meeting, your invited attendees see exactly what you see on your computer screen, as if they were sitting at your desk.
Experts recommend looking for these important features when you're shopping for an online meeting service:
- End-to-end 128-bit AES encryption to protect the privacy and security of your online meetings
- Flat-fee pricing, with no limit on the length or number of meetings
- No per-person or per-minute charges that drive up costs
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