With a virtual team of communication professionals leading a worldwide organization, the challenge in front of us is: “How do we connect and collaborate?†We’ll be writing a lot about virtual community in the coming months, but today I want to focus on video conferencing.
In our work at the Free Methodist Church – USA, we have a few different groups with video conferencing needs:
- Communications Department: Eight people in three states.
- Organization: Fifty people in multiple states.
- Missionaries: Eighty people all over the world.
Here are some quick reviews of the tools we’ve used and our recommendations:
WebEx Meeting Center
Used by: Communications Department
After researching a few solutions, we decided to try WebEx Meeting Center for our department of eight. We wound up choosing if for a few key reasons. First, the price. For $50/mo, we could have up to 25 participants and have voice, video, share screens, apps, and edit documents in realtime. Meeting Center also provides flexibility with iOS, Blackberry and Android apps to connect to meetings. Finally, WebEx has proven security features which are important to ours and most organizations.
- Pros: Price and ease of use. WebEx also decreased their pricing structure since we began using it to $19.99/mo. It gets us in the virtual meeting space with little commitment or IT support.
- Cons: Audio quality. Depending on the day, it works well.
Read the rest of the review:Â http://llcomm.org/2012/03/20/video-conferencing-roundup/
