Web conferencing provides an interesting alternative to traditional in meetings, phone conferences, and email threads for business professional. Web conferencing allows a group of people to interact in a material way by sharing ideas and documents, demonstrating products and providing training over the Internet. For business with a geographically dispersed team, a single web conference can save thousands over travel costs of bringing the team together.

The web conferencing software can be installed on your desktop, enterprise servers, or even on a service provider’s host. You run the application and invite members of the group to join. Once a person joins the web conference, a shared desktop is displayed. All team members can utilize the shared desktop to trade ideas or annotate documents and slides. Voice can be sent over the same data link, or you can send the audio using standard conference calling. Some web conference software also provides video so that a non-computer based items can be shown and discussed. This feature requires a web camera connected to each computer using the feature and a high capacity data link to carry the video data for distribution. This feature can normally be selectively disabled for members who can’t support it’s data transfer demands.

Prices vary depending on the type of service you select. A stand-alone or installed solution can cost between $600 and $1300 depending on features and the number of users allowed to connect at once. You can expect to pay $300 - $1000 per month for an ASP solution. The main difference in cost of the ASP model web conferencing solutions are the number of minutes of digital audio included in the plan and features such as rich media. 

Most web conferencing companies provide free trials from 10 – 30 days in duration.  You should take advantage of one or more of these free trials to find the web conferencing provider that best suits your needs.