Conferencing Software has evolved slowly over the years with a huge increase these last couple. Conferencing is not a new thing as you may know, and comes under many names such as, conferencing, meetings, presentations, live talk, seminar, webinar, board meeting. All of these are a form of gathering together as a group to discus or present information. The information is normally in the form of a business presentation and can really propel any company forwards.

Since the Internet we have been able to move these kind of meetings to the web. I think you can already see the bigger picture here. Web/online conferencing brings companies together like never before. It allows for true global communication. Companies with many offices not located geographically together have no problem what so ever in attending an online conference meeting at a fraction of the cost it would be for the traditional conference.

Conferencing Software started off as being able to have a small collection of attendees to come together in a room with text chat. This soon moved forwards to using audio and being able to share onscreen information such as desktop view. This was an amazing time for conferencing. The jump forward from text to audio gave a much more streamlined and productive conference enabling attendees to join in. This alone was encouraging many companies to start looking at the web for a cost cutting solution.

Around now the broadband was becoming more accessible and it was long before speeds increased and larger data packages could be transferred a lot faster. Broadband and large bandwidth also enabled more streamlined and stable communication and so we see the birth of the online video. Video was around with the audio, however, it needed more from the Internet to be able to run it smoothly and for companies to take it seriously. Conferencing software with full video streaming has not been around long, not smooth streamlined ones. Conferencing Software has now become huge over night and lots of companies are looking at the massive potential.

So now that conference software has adopted this approach, have a look at the other benefits this online business tool gives you. First of all, you will never exactly duplicate an offline meeting. That goes without saying. However, technology is giving us the opportunity to run online meetings using audio, video, text chat, file sharing, browser sharing, power point presentation sharing, video upload sharing, whiteboard sharing, and much more.

Also just recently we have seen a major increase in the amount of people who can all join a conference at the same time. Some packages allow 500+ attendees with multiple rooms, multiple moderators and multiple simultaneous video chat. This is incredible and the closest we will get to an offline conference. I have been in a conference of this size and its amazing to see how smooth the video was, I had no lag problems and enjoyed watching people from all around the globe take part. There were multiple guest speakers talking from their own homes and we had video presentations along with browsing the web using content online as part of the presentation.

My personal favourite is the file share function. The moderators of the conference can place a file, such as, word doc, pdf, image, and more into a tab on their system. Every attendee can then open the same tab on their system to gain access to the file. It’s a neat little function which i believe has huge value.

Speaking of value, you can see why many companies are turning to online conferencing software. Its almost exploded over night and just increases in functions and value.