Assessing Your Videoconferencing Needs
You don't need a spacious van just to drive yourself back and forth between work and home. Likewise, getting a top of the line telepresence system may not make sense if you’re simply going to videoconference once or twice a month with a few of your colleagues. You want to gauge your system to meet and perhaps slightly exceed your current needs while providing some potential for future expansion.
Here we lead you through the process of assessing the videoconferencing needs of your company or organization. Although this information cannot replace a series of good hands-on demos, it will help you understand your options and the tradeoffs involved in making a choice.
Caution: Although we don't want you to overspend by purchasing more system than you need, don't go cheap, either. If quality and reliability are substandard, neither you nor anyone else you plan on videoconferencing with are going to want to use the system.
In Videoconferencing 101, we explored how various industries, companies, and organizations employ videoconferencing to cut costs and improve productivity.
- How do you envision using videoconferencing in your business or organization?
- Are you going to use it for board meetings?
- One-on-one meetings with colleagues and clients?
- To provide training to groups of employees?
- To share documents?
In the following sections, we raise these questions and more and assist you in coming up with some answers for yourself.
Note: Companies that utilize the latest technologies (including videoconferencing) have an annual growth rate of five percent or more than companies who do not employ the latest technologies.
One-to-one meetings are the bread and butter of videoconferencing. They enable executives to pow-wow with one another, salespeople to speak directly with suppliers and customers, and regional office managers to communicate directly with headquarters.
Note: You can purchase an A-1 quality videoconferencing / telepresence system for about $6,000 or rent one for about $700 per month. While that figure may sound a little steep, think about how much money such a system could earn back saving travel time and expense and increasing productivity.
Sometimes, the absolute best way to handle a difficult situation is to gather everyone in one room and hold an open forum. Unfortunately, as companies expand around the globe and more and more jobs are outsourced to workers in remote locations, getting everyone into the same room can be nearly impossible without spending a whole lot of money on travel expenses. Sure, you can schedule a conference call, but that’s not quite as good as meeting with key personnel personally.
The solution? Videoconferencing with one-to-many meetings. With one-to-many meetings, top executives in headquarters can meet with regional salespeople in a single meeting. Managers can communicate with their entire staff. The president or CEO of the company can deliver important messages to everyone in the company simultaneously, just as if they were all sitting in a big boardroom together.
Some organizations commonly schedule meetings between two or more groups of people. You often see this in large educational facilities, where two classrooms connect to share information and insights and discuss topics and issues openly. Multiple campuses, state interactive video networks, and global networks are currently in place, and they couldn’t possibly function without the communications capabilities of videoconferencing.
Faculty members can learn and collaborate with peers at other institutions identifying and creating curricular materials and exploring developments in various fields. Alumni staff can reach out to alumni and share information along with their capital campaign messages. If a shortage of nursing majors exists, facilitating a nurses information course statewide would achieve faster results and be much less expensive than physically traveling to each school or campus. With groups of participants on both ends sharing information and ideas, posing questions, and offering their insights, participants feel more engaged and confident than they would in traditional online classes.
If two's company and three's a crowd, then multipoint videoconferencing is a crowd – a videoconference that involves three or more sites. Multipoint videoconferencing can be performed in a rich communication environment using audio, video, and collaborative tools, such as application sharing, group or private chat, a whiteboard, a document reader, or a DVD player. Giving participants multiple options for sending, receiving, and viewing information promotes creative and lively discussions.
Multipoint videoconferences can be hosted in either of two modes:
- Presenter mode/Continuous mode: In presenter mode, the presenter becomes the center of attention, and all other participants are expected to be quite and listen up. To muffle the crowd and silence any background noise, the passive participants either mute their microphones or have them muted by the presenter. This is ideal for large groups and training sessions.
- Voice-activated/Dialogue mode: Voice-activated/dialogue mode enables three or more sites to converse with one another. Think of it as group-discussion mode. In most cases, every site is equipped with two monitors. The presenter appears on the left, while the other sites can view themselves and their data on the right. When you speak or present data, you appear on each remote site's left monitor. When a person speaks in voice-activated mode, it takes a moment for the audio to trigger the system to switch cameras (to display the person currently talking), but it works fairly efficiently, with little interruption.
If you plan on using videoconferencing for educating or training groups of people or working collaboratively on projects, then you need a system that can deliver a shared work environment. All participants must be able to view the same information simultaneously, chat with one another, and share a desktop and software tools, such as PowerPoint, Excel, Word, or a whiteboard. In collaborative environments, participants depend on one another and are usually accountable to each other in some way.
Tip: Collaborative videoconferencing is a valuable tool in project development, team building, and general education and training. Engineers and scientists have used collaborative learning for many years to solve problems and share information.
How frequently you will need to videoconference is one of the most important considerations you need to make. If you're going to videoconference on a daily basis, you probably want to consider investing in a fairly high-quality system. If you plan to videoconference only once or twice a month, then a lower-end system may be suitable, and you may want to rent a system rather than buying one. The following items can help you gauge the quality of the system you need based on your expected frequency of use:
- Daily: If you plan on using your system every day and perhaps multiple times per day, ease of use, quality, and reliability become much more important than cost. After all, the more you use your system, the more productive it can make you and the more money it can save you and your organization in terms of time and travel.
- Weekly: If you plan on using your videoconferencing system one to three times per week, you should still be willing to spend a little more money for a system that offers higher quality, reliability, and ease of use. Once everyone who needs to use the system becomes acclimated to it, you'll soon discover that everyone is their telephone and email less frequently and relying on videoconferencing for more and more of their communications needs.
- Monthly: If you are absolutely certain that you're going to use your videoconferencing system only once a month or even less frequently, don't even think about springing for a top-of-the-line model. You'll simply be throwing your money away. For such modest needs, you can probably rent a middle-of-the-road system.
Underestimating how often you'll videoconference is far too easy a mistake to make. You might think that you'll only use the system once or twice a month, but if it's easy to use and the quality is good (which is what you'll find with all Face to Face Live videoconferencing solutions), you'll probably find yourself and others making much more frequent use of it. If you have to pull out a three-inch thick manual whenever you want to use the system or if the controls are clunky and the quality is poor, you and others will be reluctant to use it.
How good your videoconferencing needs to be depends primarily on the following three factors:
- How good you need it to be: Just as some people need to have the latest, greatest technology for their home entertainment system, some demand top-of-the-line videoconferencing, as well. If you're satisfied with a decent picture and sound, you can find plenty of good middle-of-the-road solutions.
- How often you use it: Like any tool, the more frequently you use it, the better it should be. A typical homeowner doesn't need to purchase industrial strength tools, but a carpenter probably should.
- The purpose for which you use it: If you're simply going to use the system as a video-phone, it doesn't need a lot of bells and whistles. On the other hand, if you're going to be doing presentations, sharing documents and applications, and collaborating on projects, you need a system that’s much more robust.
Tip: Whether you use your car on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, you still want it to start right up and run properly. So too with videoconferencing. Affordable systems are available that are easy to use, reliable, provide high-quality audio and video, and are flexible. Don't simply buy the cheapest system available – it could cost you much more in the long run, because you'll never use it and never be able to reap its benefits.
