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Articles » Communications » VOIP » The five most important factors to consider in selecting your teleconferencing service
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- Article Views: 227
- Word Count: 795
- Date Contributed: Mar 03, 2008
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| The five most important factors to consider in selecting your teleconferencing service |
Choosing a conference call company is not easy. Just type the phrase "conference call" into Yahoo and you'll see dozens of services. Fortunately, most of them differentiate their services on a small-group of factors. Understanding these elements, and thinking through their relative importance to the needs of your organization, is the best way to make a good decision. Research in the field indicates that there are five elements which usually enable a user to make a good decision. To help you make that choice, this article reviews these 5 areas.
1. The cost
All conference calling services cost something to use. This is true even of the services that position themselves as "free." Why is that? With the exception of an entirely VOIP based system (e.g. Skype), all-conference calling services require users to dial a bridge number. In the case of services that provide toll-free bridge numbers, a per minute charge is assessed. The lowest fee you can typically arrange is several cents on a per minute basis typically you'll be paying five to ten cents per minute. This charge is assessed cumulatively. In other words, if there are 5 participants on a 60 minute call, a 300 minute charge will be incurred. Some services still charge legacy rates and of 20 or 25 cents a minute and these plans are to be avoided! As discussed earlier, some services are free in the sense that there is no charge levied by the provider. However, these offerings do not provide a toll-free number with their free services and as such users will incur normal long-distance charges to participate.
2. Scheduling ability
Services usually fall into one of two general buckets. Paid and high end corporate services often provide a scheduling interface which enables the organizer to set up the conference call. For the services that feature an Outlook integration or similar sort of functionality, a pin code and dial-in bridge can be automatically allocated to the user when the user wishes to do her own call scheduling. The free conference calling systems usually provide only a pin code and dial-in bridge; the organizer of the conference call is responsible for sending individual e-mails and keeping track of individual replies. At the present time, the sole free conference calling service available in the industry featuring both capabilities (scheduling and on-the-fly conferencing) as well as response tracking is Rondee.com.
3. Archiving and Recording
For a lot of users, the ability to retain information connected to the call or even the call itself can be quite valuable. Some services allow recording of the conference call in WAV format, GSM or both formats. Some companies provide this capability for free but generally it is found as included feature of paid conferencing services. The audio file is usually retrieved after the conference call has ended via a link from the service provider's web site or a link e-mailed to the users. It is generally not possible to email the audio file itself because of capacity constraints. Some services provide the conference agenda to be archived. This capability is obviously not possible with services that only offer a pin code and dial-in number but can be offered by services that offer scheduling capability because the scheduling template captures the call specific information.
4. Sharing Your Desktop
Sometimes a conference call is not limited to audio. If your business necessitates visual sharing of information (e.g. financial spreadsheets), desktop sharing will be a critical component of a successful conference call. Some users choose a best-of-breed strategy and use different providers for their desktop sharing and conferencing. Increasingly, however, conference calling companies are moving aggressively to bundle desktop sharing functionality into their underlying product. In the case of well-known companies such as GoToMeeting, this is part of a strategy to capture both segments of the market. In the case of conferencing, desktop sharing is being offered as a paid feature to generate added revenue.
5. Personalization
A typical complaint from users of conferencing systems is the need to remember random dial--in bridge numbers and pin-codes. In the last year, confluence of telecom and internet technologies is solving this problem. Some conference call services allow for users to customize their PIN codes to something more memorable. There are some systems which also offer painless access when users call from a known phone number. Such systems, however, do necessitate user registration in order to enable a matching of the user's phone number.
For most users, the final choice of teleconferencing service will require weighting these (and perhaps other) factors according to your organization's requirements. The good news is that the explosion of competition in this market is expanding the services available to you.
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A prolific commentator on topics involving free conference calling, Rob Butterworth advises Rondee.com on its strategy to reengineer the current telephony market.  www.rondee.com
Article Source: UnArchived Articles
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