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What is Web Conferencing and how is it Supplemented by VoIP?

Face-to-face business meetings that required airline travel and overnight stays have given way to Web conferencing, and to great advantage. Old-style face-to-face business conferences are costly, and often impractical, especially for smaller businesses on a tight budget. Web conferencing and business VoIP both play a large role in facilitating this major shift.

Before Web conferencing became available and business VoIP started to rule the day, meetings by phone were very limited and often impractical. The conversation could take place, but data could not be shared in real time, and this led to the need for expensive travel. Now, since the Web conferencing takes place over a business VoIP network, the IP infrastructure provides a convenient backbone for easy sharing of all types of data. It is possible, for example, for a Web conference to take place where all parties can hear one another, and collaborate on a document at the same time that is visible to all parties. The fact that Web conferencing is very inexpensive and easy to implement makes it possible for small businesses to take advantage of this advanced technology, even from a remote location anywhere in the world.

Web Conferencing

The Web conference can be either through a hosted service or facilitated through on-premises software. There are several third-party hosted Web conferencing services available, which are simple to use and quite inexpensive. At the same time, larger companies that wish to run the conferences themselves can obtain on-premises software and equipment to facilitate the conference. Regardless, Web conferencing can prove very valuable for business meetings, sales presentations, training sessions, and "Webinars." The meeting is live and in real time, and is designed to create the virtual equivalent of a face-to-face meeting, complete with the ability to share information in real time, and the ability of each participant to edit or mark up a document that is being shared between all participants. In addition to all participants being able to speak to one another, there may also be a message board included in the Web conferencing application.

The "Webinar" is often uni-directional, although true web conferencing is highly interactive, with all parties being able to participate in all directions. There may also be a video element, where either all parties, or the group leader, is visible to the rest.

Web conferencing is of course built on a business VoIP backbone, and would be impossible or impractical through a conventional circuit-switched network. This is largely because a Web conference is built on both voice and data, and therefore requires dual data streams, which is made possible on the IP network.

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