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Leading communications technology provider Polycom has now
developed the WebOffice, which it believes "redefines personal
desktop conferencing".
Polycom WebOffice is a web-based collaboration solution
that enables users to share data and communicate in real time.
It acts as a "conferencing portal", integrating a range of
conferencing and data sharing applications.
Each WebOffice user has their own "office" which provides
them with an individual, unchanging URL for their web-based
meetings. Upon entering their WebOffice, users are presented
with WebOffice Manager, which displays their buddy list (with
presence detection, so you know if your buddies are available).
There are simple buttons for either instant messaging, or
launching a voice, video or web conference – or any combination
of these elements. All of the controls users need to manage
their data, audio and video conference are integrated into the
WebOffice window, including the video display.
Starting a conference is as easy as clicking a button. To
invite others to their meeting, the user simply selects
participants from their buddy list or provides their personal
URL to meeting participants, who can access the user’s WebOffice
through any web browser.
Once in a collaboration session, the participants can present
documents, share applications, use whiteboarding capabilities or
instantly launch an audio and/or video conference. For control
and security, the WebOffice owner can encrypt documents, limit
the number of participants, and add or remove participants at
any time.
According to Phil Keenan, senior vice president and general
manager of network systems for Polycom,
“With WebOffice and the expansion to a personal
conferencing portal, Polycom is the first to deliver what
users have been asking for: easy, on-demand access to
conferencing and collaboration tools through a single,
easy-to-use integrated interface.
"Our personal conferencing portal puts all conferencing
capabilities at a user’s fingertips, along with access to
their co-workers. Launching a conference is instantaneous and
extremely simple, yet the collaboration capabilities are very
powerful and the applications are limitless.”
The WebOffice user can link in with users of group
videoconferencing systems and separate desktop appliance-based
systems, like the one below.
What are the benefits?
Companies using conferencing technologies point out the
benefits both in terms of productivity and reducing costs
associated with unnecessary travelling.
Cutting out travel to meetings in itself allows people to be
more productive. But having a sufficiently flexible system
also allows people to be called into conferences on an as-needed
basis - to present information, answer queries or add input to
an important decision.
Conferencing also allows people to work jointly using
applications shared online, adding face-to-face interaction to
online collaboration. As well as internal meetings linking
different sites, working with customers can become more
efficient. An example of this is DRP Group, a "total
presentations" company employing 30 people in two UK locations.
It offers services such as corporate training and promotional
videos to clients such as Autoglass and Thomas Cook.
According to Managing Director Dale Parmenter:
"We use videoconferencing to edit client videos online, which
speeds up the decision-making and approval processes so much
that it has transformed our productivity.
Videoconferencing allows us to meet with four clients a day
instead of just one. Faster processes means better quality
work and greatly improved customer service."
As DRP have found, it can also help in expanding markets
overseas - they now operate on 5 continents, but without the
added costs of frequent overseas travel.
Other companies, such as Royal Bank of Scotland, have been
held up by the Department for Transport as exemplars in reducing
travel through videoconferencing. RBS have calculated that
they save £70k per month in reducing travel to internal
meetings by using audio- and videoconferencing.
Progressive uses in the public sector
There are also examples of good practice using
videoconferencing in the education and health sectors.
In the London Borough of Hackney, the Highwire City
Learning Centre (CDC) became the first of it's kind in the UK to
open with the aim of improving teaching and learning through the
use of the latest information and communications technologies
(ICT), particularly video communications. It is using Polycom
conferencing technologies to link nine secondary and two primary
schools to create virtual classrooms. Pupils can now take
part in multi-site lessons and special events regardless of
where there school is. This allows teachers to deliver
specialised teaching to small groups of students across the
Borough, including those with specific needs or minority
interests.
In France, Doctors at the Saint Brieuc Hospital in Brittany
use videoconferencing to supervise dialysis sessions at a remote
part-time centre run by nurses 75km away. This has been
estimated to have saved French social security around
34,000euros in reduced travel costs - equivalent to 225 of the
annual costs of providing dialysis there.
We are just at the beginning of seeing government-provided
services operating in these ways. Modernising how services
are delivered is key to making the most of extra resources being
put into public services.
Technologies whose time has come?
There remain cultural barriers and a certain routine
scepticism to overcome. Many managers have perhaps tried
videoconferencing in the past, and been frustrated by delays or
jerky pictures transmitted over ISDN. Or maybe they've had to
travel to special centres, making it seem almost as much of a
chore as travelling to a meeting, and not used the new online
collaboration tools. The result is that they came out
feeling that they've just been to a sub-standard meeting.
Others insist on the value of personal meetings in the flesh,
and don't believe the improved technologies can substitute for
this. Well it's true that people do need to meet - but not
all the time, and not regardless of the cost.
The vastly improved technologies, in particular high-quality
desktop options, and the productivity and cost benefits make an
overwhelmingly powerful case for flexible conferencing.
It's worth remembering that the humble telephone
was once a piece of kit reserved for the boss, or at best to be
shared amongst a large group of workers. It took some 80 or 90 years after
it was invented for there to be one on everyone's desk as a
matter of course.
We expect that the roll-out of desktop
conferencing kit shouldn't take anywhere near as long as that.
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