GoToMeeting Really is Like Being There

GoToMeeting is touted as a business solution that can replace in-person business presentations. The concept is compelling. Add up the cost of travel plus the value of the time lost getting to and from the designated meeting spot times the number of participants and the cost of even a small get-together can be staggering. Once you discover the true cost, you really can't justify calling business meetings anymore unless they are absolutely essential. Certainly not if there is an electronic solution that can strip away all the inefficiency and leave you only with the incremental cost of the meeting itself. But is there really?

I had a chance to experience GoToMeeting for myself a few days ago. The subject was a presentation from a telecommunications vendor to a group of marketing agents. The presentation itself had the mission of introducing the company's product line, providing enough information so that agents were equipped to sell the products, and generating enough interest that sales efforts would begin almost immediately. A combination audio conference call with GoToMeeting visuals was selected as the best way to simultaneously reach this geographically diverse group of agents.

Participation was simplicity in itself. An email message invited each of us to participate by dialing a phone number and entering a conference code to connect to the audio portion of the program. I did that on my trusty Uniden speakerphone that sits on my computer table. Also in the invite was a link to click to join the visual portion of the program. Clicking that link took me to the GoToMeeting site where the system downloaded a small piece of client software to my computer. It was all automatic and took less than a couple of minutes. There were instructions to follow if something got stuck in a firewall or didn't load properly. No need. GoToMeeting fired up without a hitch.

What I saw on my 19 inch monitor was two windows. One was a blank presentation screen. The other was a control panel. GoToMeeting had asked me to enter my name and email to participate in this meeting. When the control panel appeared, there was my name in the list along with names of the presenter and other participants. A lower window in the control panel offered real-time chat messaging. In this case the message was from one of the meeting organizers who listed the phone number and access code for anyone who hadn't dialed-in yet. Other messages appeared as the presentation went on. I could have entered something to say to the group if I had wanted to.

Once the presentation got underway, the blank screen became a display of the presentation slides. With a click, I expanded this window to full screen and collapsed the control panel. Every once in a while a thought bubble message appeared on the panel announcing that a new participant had joined the meeting.

With the big screen display of the meeting slides a foot from my nose and the presenter's voice on the speakerphone, I was quickly having flashbacks to the last few times I sat in a darkened conference room listening to a similar presentation with no better view of the slide screen or ability to hear the presenter. This was better and more comfortable, as I relaxed in attire too informal for even casual Fridays in corporate America. Plus, this call was in the evening. Sure glad I didn't have to go out in the freezing air and drive ten miles just to sit in somebody else's paneled room. They probably would have provided a plate of coffee and donuts as a favor. But I was glad to sit in my warm office and munch my own cookies.

In my case, I got the full value of an hour's meeting while avoiding an extra hour's round trip through town just for transportation. That's assuming an in-house presentation. If the meeting was at a remote office or plant site, there would be a bus ride, plane trip, rental car and perhaps an overnight in a hotel just to get the same information from the same source with the same fellow participants. Now, I ask you. In this economic environment which makes more sense: Going to a meeting or GoToMeeting?

Cisco's Virtual Teleportation Replaces Airports

Aficionados of Star Trek have long anticipated the day when we could simply beam instantly to wherever we want to go. Well, the technology just isn't there yet. There have been some interesting experiments in quantum physics that suggest physical teleportation may indeed be possible. But it's probably going to have to wait for another century. We we have now, thanks to Cisco, is virtual teleportation.

What can the virtual form of teleportation do for you? How about take you instantly to a business meeting in Hong Kong or Germany or New York? You walk into the conference room and find your colleagues seated around the meeting table. But only some of them are where you are. Others are somewhere else in the world. They look the same, they sound the same. But they are on the other side of a table that you can't reach across.

Cisco calls this technology TelePresence. It's a major improvement in the last big advance in collaboration, video conferencing. The low resolution, small screen size and muddy audio typical of many video conferencing systems has been replaced by large flat screen displays, high definition full motion video, high fidelity audio, and a virtual conference table.

The table is the final touch of magic that makes the TelePresence experience seem real. Each TelePresence room is outfitted with a half table pushed up against a wall. When you turn on the system, the other half of the table appears through the video displays on the wall making it look like there is a single large table. Your local team sits on the physical side. Other participants sit on the virtual side. Except to them they are sitting on the physical side and you are sitting on the virtual side.

Cisco has deployed about 1,000 of these TelePresence systems to about 200 enterprise customers worldwide. They also have a fleet of their own TelePresence meeting rooms in 129 cities of 40 countries. I say fleet, because what Cisco has really created here is a replacement for airlines and airports.

Consider a typical business meeting. You go to an airport, board a plane, land at another airport, and then go to a more or less standard business meeting room at your destination. They're pretty much all the same. You have a large wooden desk with arm chairs in a windowless room containing acoustic tiles and fluorescent lights. There's an overhead projector with screen, a computer to upload your PowerPoint presentations, and a roll-around cart with coffee dispensers. The conference rooms are standardized, as are the airports and planes. So why not just get rid of the airports and planes?

Since all you really need are the conference rooms, just go ahead and hook them together. A TelePresence system and a high bandwidth connection allow you to remove the wall between the conference rooms and simply join them. It's just like opening the partition between two physical rooms in one building. Except that those rooms can be anywhere on Earth that you can get the needed bandwidth. That's pretty much any metropolitan area these days.

Cisco is now renting out their own TelePresence rooms starting at $299 an hour. Expensive room rent? Not really. You'll have a hard time spending less than that to transport one participant via air. If you need to send several people with perhaps overnight stays, Cisco's offer starts to look downright cheap. If your company does a lot of meetings, the cost of a dedicated in-house TelePresence conference center may well be justified. So it may cost up to several hundred thousand dollars for a deluxe setup? So what? How much does that private jet cost to operate and maintain?

Cisco's promoting their TelePresence service as an alternative to the inconvenience of travel. But the benefits go beyond cost savings and the avoided travel stresses. With TelePresence you have the ability to arrange same day meetings with international participation. Teams may just move into one of these rooms to collaborate on their projects. Imagine the productivity improvement when everyone is at the same table continuously. Communications delays become a thing of the past.

Cisco's order of magnitude improvement to video conferencing has created a "realness" to virtual meetings that could become so comfortable that physical meetings may seem ridiculous. Yeah, but, you can't all go out to lunch or dinner, can you? Why not? With the same catering at each end, why can't you dine virtually? There may even be a way to play those silly team bonding games with props and facilitators at each end. Anyone want to hang climbing ropes from the ceilings?

All this virtual collaboration may seem a bit awkward now, but I've got a feeling that it could catch on and become the norm rather than the exception. It wasn't that long ago that exchanging documents was done by overnight mail rather than instantaneous email or even FAX. Who wants to wait for the Post Office anymore? Could the day be far away that people will say, "who wants to wait for a plane anymore?"