What is web conferencing?

You can work together like you do in person, without traveling. You’ll save time and money, get things done faster, and serve your customers better. For example, you can use web conferencing (also called web meeting, online meeting, or web collaboration) to:

• Make sales presentations online.
• Demonstrate applications for sales or training.
• Collaborate on product designs with distributed teams.
• Look at planning documents and budget spreadsheets together in regular staff meetings.

It's easy to use web conferencing. See for yourself! Try WebEx free for 14 days.

It’s so easy to use WebEx that you can quickly turn an ordinary phone call into “show and tell”.  Just open a web conference and send a link to the person you’re talking with so he can join you.

You can open your web conference from any web browser, from a handy desktop console, or with some services, right from many applications. You can just click on the ball in your IM program, Skype, Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document to begin sharing your desktop when you use WebEx Meeting Center, for example.

You can also schedule WebEx sessions in advance using Outlook and sending out invitations, just like you would for in-person meetings—even using the recurring feature for regularly scheduled meetings. It’s a great way to make conference calls with remote teams much more productive. You can also set up a WebEx session as an add-on to in-person meetings, like your weekly staff meetings, so people who are out of the office can see the documents and presentations that are shared, too.

WebEx web conferencing works across platforms, so you and your meeting attendees can participate in the same session from PC, Mac, Linux, and Solaris systems.

• VIEW CASE STUDY 

"We did a study last year and discovered that WebEx has saved us over a half million dollars. Those gains were from keeping employees in their office where they could productively communicate with clients, customers, and one another without having to incur travel costs.”

—Mark Phillips, Vice President-Strategy, StarCite, Inc.

 

WebEx audio conferencing is an integrated part of the session, included in the same invitation. Once people join the web meeting, they’ll connect using the audio options, which may include toll free call-in, call-back, or VoIP, depending on your service. People who are not at their computers can still join the audio portion of the meeting and participate that way.

Depending on the capabilities of your web conferencing software, you can share your whole desktop or just a single application. Everyone in the meeting can see whatever you decide to share—even if they don’t have that application installed. And you can pass control, so others can share from their desktops as well.

You don’t have to use a webcam with your web conferencing, but you can if you like. It can help add a more friendly tone to your online meeting, particularly for sales presentations. Some people choose to turn a webcam on at the beginning of a session to make that face-to-face contact (showing the host only, or a round-robin of attendees, with everyone saying hello), then turn it off so full attention is on the shared visuals.

Once you start using web conferencing it quickly becomes essential to the way you do business. Try WebEx free to see why, or learn more about specific solutions for your particular needs.

Small and Medium Businesses:

If you're interested in solutions for a work group, team, or department, you'll want to check out our solutions for Small and Medium Businesses. In addition to our core web conferencing application, WebEx Meeting Center, we offer specialized applications for large events and webinars, training, and support.

Large Business, Government Agencies, and Enterprises:

If you're shopping for solutions for a large business, global organization or enterprise, request a consultation and let us show you how WebEx fits in as a key component of Cisco's Unified Communication solution.