Frequently seen as a technological breakthrough especially in the corporate world, web conferencing is an application used to hold group meetings or live presentations over the Internet. In its earlier days, web conferencing was synonymous to computer conferencing in that both refer to group discussions conducted within a message board via posted text messages.

However, more recent advances in technology and software developments led to a change in how the concept was perceived. No longer was the term web conferencing used to refer to text messages, but it came to encompass a whole new world of messaging where the environment is live and synchronous. The posted message variety came to include only such discussions

as forums, message boards, and bulletin boards.

How Does Web Conferencing Work: Basic Features

During web conferencing, each participant of the meeting sits at his own computer that is connected to others’ computers via the Internet. The Internet therefore serves as the matrix by which the whole web conferencing network relies on. The most basic feature of this particular type of system is screen sharing. In this particular feature, the web conferencing participants have the capability to see whatever is on the presenter’s screen. Presenter-participant interaction is usually facilitated via voice communication which may sometimes be accompanied by video. Voice is transmitted via the VoIP system (or Voice over Internet) or a typical phone conferencing system. Other applications may also integrate text chat to increase options for users to interact with each other.

Other typical features of web conferencing applications include: slide presentations (often created through PowerPoint), application sharing (in which participants can cooperatively manipulate a spreadsheet or any other program on the presenter’s computer), web co-browsing, annotation (allowing the presenter to highlight or mark items on the display), text messaging, file sharing, and polls and surveys. Additionally, some web conferencing packages allows conferences to be recorded for later playback on demand.

Web Conferencing and VoIP

It is a growing trend web conferencing to incorporate as much communications media into a single system as possible in an effort to produce a full-featured package. One prime example is VoIP. Initially used to enable routing of voice conversations over the Internet or any other IP network, VoIP is fast becoming an important feature of a typical web conferencing package, replacing even the more traditional phone system. It is different from a regular phone in that it allows voice data to flow over a general-purpose packet-switched network instead of the traditional dedicated, circuit-switched voice transmission lines.

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Web Conferencing