Web Collaboration Suites for Your Business

Today, you can't run your business by sitting in one location, you need to

move around, meet clients and most importantly collaborate for business

benefits. However, enabling efficient collaboration for employees on the go is

one of the challenges most businesses face today. There are two different ways

of enabling collaboration, one is complete in-house deployment, which gives

complete control, but requires more investment and adds pressure on the already

stretched IT team to manage more components.The other way is much simpler and

cost efficient way of on demand service, where everything is managed by the

service provider. You just need to pay for the service used. We will talk on the

latter option that needs only a few components like Internet connection with

decent bandwidth, computing device (laptops, desktops, etc), web cam, mike and

speakers. Let's evaluate some solutions that provide right Web conferencing and

collaboration solution.

Cisco WebEx



At the heart of the different solutions provided for both SMEs and large

businesses by WebEx lies secure and reliable MediaTone network. Before

explaining more about MediaTone network, let me list what all is provided by

WebEx. There is the WebEx Meeting Center which can hold unlimited online

meetings from your desktop or laptop. It also gives the ability to share

presentation, documents, web cam, and demo applications, and also has integrated

teleconferencing facility. To make your online meeting experience richer, you

can launch WebEx meetings from different Microsoft applications like Outlook,

share desktops, and have audio/video conferencing. WebEx Support center

enables remote view and control of desktops over Internet for minimum time for

resolution of customer issues. The WebEx Event Center gives an efficient

mechanism to conduct online events like Web seminars for boosting your sales.

Sales lead management, automated invitation and registration, and automated

reminders are few features of this solution. WebEx Sales Center helps you

conduct sales meetings with customers over Internet. It helps your sales

representative demonstrate products to customers over the web, and allows you to

involve subject matter experts in meetings with just a few clicks. Finally WebEx

Traning Center can turn your browser into an efficient training room with the

facility of online labs and on the fly evaluation.

The interface of WebEx Meeting Center. You can communicate to audience in multiple ways like chat, voice, video, etc.

Let's move back to how are these solutions enabled. In order to facilitate

large scale, real time Web collaborations, the MediaTone network was designed

keeping in mind that users would eventually need more than simple desktop and

application sharing over the Internet. One of the main functions of this private

network remains synchronizing voice and data to all users while maintaining high

data security and minimum transport delays. A dedicated architecture is what's

required for enterprise scale collaboration spanning corporate networks and the

Internet. Along with enterprise wide deployment, other things like quality of

service, capacity management, security and end user experience are also the key

factors that need to be taken care of. The MediaTone network comprises of

purpose built multimedia switches integrated with a dedicated IP infrastructure.

The application specific multimedia switches placed at key peering points

ensures handling of rapid session traffic, and guaranteeing high quality of

service for Web conferencing. The network is purpose built for real time

communication and the switch farms are located in secure data center facilities.

In addition to several large data centers housing major meeting nodes, there are

also a number of nodes deployed around the world. Moving to the security aspect,

we all know that enterprises are Firewall protected and the data entering and

exiting is checked on. The policies by which these Firewalls are used and

operated are decided by the organization. For using WebEx, the Firewall doesn't

need to be shut down or modified in any way possible as the WebEx client

communicates through standard ports HTTP on port 80 or HTTPS signed by VeriSign

, and encrypted with 128 bit SSL on port 443. Additionally it may also encrypt

data with Advanced Encryption Standard or AES. WebEx also supports fully locked

down PCs with client side deployment fully controlled by the IT department using

software distribution automation. For maximum availability of MediaTone switch

capacity, WebEx never stores live data from meetings. This has a direct impact

on the number of total available sessions and participants possible. The

mechanism employed by WebEx MediaTone, Global switch load balancing (GLSB)

guarantees expedite meeting switching and broadcasting by accessing the least

used modules in the network. The MediaTone platform has been designed for

continuous service, 100% uptime and very robust cutover to redundant nodes

during outages.

The interface of Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro; from a single interface you can manage the entire suite of collaboration solutions.

Citrix GoToMeeting



Similar to other collaboration suites, Citrix also has a set of solution

that can help employees of an organization to perform more efficiently while on

the move. Here is a brief introduction of various solutions provided by Citrix;

these solutions are provided for both individual and business usage.

GoToMeeting is solution for online meeting.

This allows users not only to collaborate, demonstrate and present but is

also integrated with the capability of free VoIP calls and phone conferencing.

The second solution in the Citrix collaboration suite is GoToWebinar that

allows you to easily present, train and demonstrate to large audiences online.

Using this solution, you can engage up to thousand people at a time plus it

automatically generates Webinar invitations, branded registration pages and

audience polls and surveys.

During an online event, GoToWebinar provides easy interactive tools like hand

raising and Q & A and enables presenters to monitor audience participation with

ease. GoToWebinar also creates ranked attendee reports so that you can follow up

with attendees most interested in the presentation. You can also record your

Webinars for future reference. For remote access, Citrix provides two solutions

--GoToMyPc and GoToAssist, while the former allows you to access your Mac and PC

from any Web browser in real time, the later needs endpoint software for remote

desktop sharing that helps in resolving customers' issues in minimum time.

Besides, you can also use GoView solution that captures computer screen and

audio; you can instantly share captured recording online. All these solutions

provided by Citrix are secured using SSL and 128-bit AES encryption to ensure

that confidential information remains private.

Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro



This solution gives an organization the flexibility of deployment; you can

either choose from hosted service like other two solutions. Other two deployment

options are on premises and managed services. Let's look at different solutions

under Connect Pro. First one is the Web conferencing solution which requires Web

browser and Flash player. With Adobes Flash Player already installed on more

that 98% of machines world wide, there is no download needed. Salient features

of this solution include ability to share your screen, use the same URL for

persistent meeting rooms that are always available, ability to integrate with

audio conferencing platform, recording capability, etc.

Second solution in Connect Pro suite is eLearning. This software provides the

capability to provide online training. Features of this solution include tools

to create content for training by reusing content, ability to share screen,

ability to capture scores of participants performance plus various learning

management features. This solution can also be integrated with external learning

management system of your organization.

Third and final solution is web seminars. This solution provides capability

to reach effectively to more audience. You can have up to eighty thousand

attendees in a web seminar at a time. Other noticeable features of this solution

include capability to brand customer facing events and automated registration

management and notification. Web seminars can be integrated with Microsoft

Outlook and IBM Lotus Notes. Acrobat Connect Pro protects sensitive data and

manages communication flows with robust security features. 128-bit SSL

encryption protects your communications and data in real time, during meeting

sessions, as well as during on-demand playback and when systems are upgraded.

The easy-to-use administration console enables you to configure LDAP server

details, authentication methods, and advanced settings, such as timeouts and

query page-size limits. You can enable forced recordings of all meetings, save

chat transcripts, and display notices and disclaimers to all meeting

participants.

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