Real Time Online Collaboration

Real Time Online Collaboration

updated by rck, 2008-03-08

Sometimes, a forum or even a chat is not enough. You want direct communication with someone across the world, with voice and visual support. For quite some time now Skype is one of the leading Voice-over-IP solutions, even having support for connecting to the outside world (=regular phones) and creating phone conferences (=phoning with multiple people).

Add a nice screen-sharing program to that, maybe even a collection of web-based productivity applications and you should be able to discuss and write down your ideas pretty quickly.

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All together now
So there you have it. A lot of tools that can help to get your meeting going. I'd like to give a short summary on how you could organize your online meeting here.

Preparing the Meeting
Find a good time and date. Google Calendar might be helpful here Invite all participants. Send your IP address, so people can join the conference easily. Also prepare an agenda and send it with the invitation, so people know what the meeting is about. Tell people how to set up their stuff (especially NetMeeting). Of course you can also send a link to this article. Request the Skype IDs. If you don't know them yet. And add them to your Skype account

Preparing the Meeting

Find a good time and date. Google Calendar might be helpful here
Invite all participants. Send your IP address, so people can join the conference easily. Also prepare an agenda and send it with the invitation, so people know what the meeting is about.
Tell people how to set up their stuff (especially NetMeeting). Of course you can also send a link to this article.
Request the Skype IDs. If you don't know them yet. And add them to your Skype account

Running the Meeting
Connect to NetMeeting. Make sure, all the invited participants appear on your NetMeeting connection list. Connect to Skype. Create a conference call with all the participants. Or do a one-to-one connection. Then, start the video-conferencing if you want. Share your screen. Remember the Share-icon of Netmeeting? Open your document(s). And start working! You can also show web-pages and whatever kind of stuff you'd like to show.

Running the Meeting

Connect to NetMeeting. Make sure, all the invited participants appear on your NetMeeting connection list.
Connect to Skype. Create a conference call with all the participants. Or do a one-to-one connection. Then, start the video-conferencing if you want.
Share your screen. Remember the Share-icon of Netmeeting?
Open your document(s). And start working! You can also show web-pages and whatever kind of stuff you'd like to show.

Finishing the Meeting
Prepare Action items. If needed, you can also discuss about a follow-up meeting. For maintaining ToDo-Lists, I like using Rember the Milk which can also be embedded into Google Calendar and Google Mail and allows to share tasks. Share your documents. So everyone is at least able to read the meeting minutes Thank everyone for attending. Important! Close the Connections. Except you'd like others to see the stuff you are doing of course. And: Have fun!

Finishing the Meeting

Prepare Action items. If needed, you can also discuss about a follow-up meeting. For maintaining ToDo-Lists, I like using Rember the Milk which can also be embedded into Google Calendar and Google Mail and allows to share tasks.
Share your documents. So everyone is at least able to read the meeting minutes
Thank everyone for attending. Important!
Close the Connections. Except you'd like others to see the stuff you are doing of course.

And: Have fun!

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Services covered in this document
Voice- and Videochat
Screen Sharing
Web-based documents
All together now
Acknowledgement

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