How to Make The Most of Your Web Meeting

Web meetings are becoming common place as companies seek to reduce travel costs. How can you make these meetings go smoothly?

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Collaborative software that lets everyone interact via a web meeting
• A phone or VOIP line

1. Having an administrative assistant set up the meeting often results in them being out of the loop of changes, leaving attendees often not informed of cancellations or changed details. The meeting organizer should be listed as the meeting coordinator, both in the invitations and in the meeting software. Then whenever meeting information changes, the meeting coordinator makes the changes and the meeting attendees are able to get information directly from the organizer.

2. Passwords for on-line meetings are often not allowed to be sent by e-mail to attendees due to security reasons. Therefore, the meeting password is usually said over the phone conference call immediately at the start of the meeting. However, as with all meetings, there are always stragglers. To prevent the password being repeated every time someone else calls in, set the ground rules that the password to the online portion will be said at 5 and 15 minutes in.

3. Avoid passwords to online meetings that are not the same on everyone’s computer. For example, avoid the apostrophe as a character in a password. Depending on the user’s system, the apostrophe can look like ‘, `, and '. The same character in concept, three different characters from someone’s keyboard – and only one of those will be correct according to the web meeting software.

Tips & Warnings

• Schedule your web meeting to start 15 minutes before the real one, so that the software has time to load and complete the creation of the web meeting before your attendees actually sign on.
• Web meetings often involve software demonstrations. The presenter should ideally be presenting from the computer that the software demonstration is actually running on. Then the demonstration is live, without delays of the network connection from the host running the application and the host running the web meeting presenter’s software. This also reduces the risk of one of the two computers locking up, ruining the purpose of the presentation. Furthermore, the use of one computer to hold both the web meeting and the demonstration means that the presenter’ s computer can devote all bandwidth to the presentation. This is contrasted to connecting to the web meeting AND connecting to the application host, which causes bandwidth to be eaten up on the presenter’ s system and often results in delays for the web meeting.

Resources

• From Whence We Meet
• Six sigma projects - incremental or seismic? (Kindle Edition)
• Saving Money, Time, Sanity and Yourself

[moneysaga]

on 12/9/2009 great article. 5stars

[goldiec]

on 8/15/2009 Thanks for sharing this article on how to make the most of your web meeting. 5*

[djackman]

on 7/30/2009 Good article on making the most of your web meeting 5* and recommended