The good news is that Web conferencing products from application service providers (ASPs) such as WebEx, PlaceWare, Astound, and DigitalSpace--which offers some dramatic 3D effects in its virtual meetings--are reliable, secure, scalable, and affordable. Costs range from $10 to $30 per user, per hour. Some services, such as WebEx, charge by the minute.
Other service providers offer a fixed monthly fee based on the number of seats or total usage. Generally, fixed-fee plans provide more, and sometimes even unlimited, usage. You can expect to pay anywhere from $500 to $2,000 per month for about 50 seats (about $10 to $40 per user), which is still a whole lot cheaper than a room at the Marriott. Beyond 50 or so users, it may be less expensive to purchase a system and deploy it on your network.
Using an ASP has one distinct advantage over purchasing software: you don't pay up-front to use the service. An ASP also minimizes the likelihood of incompatible software, because the application is mounted on a remote server. What's more, the ASP assumes full responsibility for the upkeep of the application at its site. Before you sign a service agreement, you should take a test-drive with one of the free trials that most vendors offer.
The primary disadvantage of an ASP is that you have to send sensitive data and discussions outside your intranet. In addition, overall performance may be slower, especially for remote users who may be using dial-up access. Encrypting and encapsulating data could drag down performance even more.
Software products
Software products cost anywhere from a few hundred dollars to many thousands of dollars, depending on the number of users and features. Usage is free as long as you use your own point-to-point tunneling, encryption, or encapsulation processes. You tend to get what you pay for. For example, Microsoft's free NetMeeting utility, bundled with Windows, is best suited for teens who exchange grainy pictures with one another. That's because NetMeeting is slow, crashes some firewalls, and gets hung up in others.
Lotus Sametime and Microsoft Exchange 2000 Conferencing Server both offer a full range of conferencing tools such as application sharing, whiteboarding/annotation, audio (voice-over-IP or telephone), video, chat (public and private), information on attendees, anonymous voting, and tool-availability control for moderators. Lotus prices Sametime at $27 per seat, with volume discounts available. Microsoft Exchange Server 2000 costs about $4,000, plus a per-seat cost of $67, and requires Microsoft Exchange, which also costs about $4,000.
