For the money, you get an affordable communication conduit that, as long as you take proper precautions, will allow you to communicate securely with colleagues, partners, and customers.
The security precautions that you need to take are about the same with ASPs and in-house systems, provided that participants follow minimal security guidelines, such as not letting the application save passwords and not writing down passwords at their desks.
Security could be a greater concern if you use your in-house system to communicate with key partners and customers beyond the firewall. In that extended extranet configuration, you would want to create a virtual private network over leased lines or use tunneling, encryption, or encapsulation to protect sensitive data. ASPs are somewhat better equipped for remote collaboration, since that is the basis of their service model.
Scalability is a relatively minor concern with either ASPs or packaged software. Most services and software products offer practically unlimited capacity for simultaneous conferences as well as for the number of participants. For example, PlaceWare Web Conferencing hosts an unlimited number of conferences, with up to 2,500 participants. Soft Bicycle claims that its Consensus AnyWare hosted service can handle an unlimited number of simultaneous discussions and users. Scalability is ordinarily not an issue unless you use the application to broadcast a message to thousands of people.
Considering the surprisingly similar features of ASPs and packaged software, you should choose an application based on the kind of interaction you expect between the moderator and the other attendees. For example, if you intend to use the application for multipoint team building, information sharing, and problem solving, you want an application that offers annotation, calendaring, and schedule management. The latter two features will help moderators schedule the time for the meetings, verify the availability of the participants, and create an agenda.
If your model involves a passive audience, for example, when making a presentation to a client or colleagues, you need simpler tools such as public or private text chat or an instant messenger and perhaps file transfer.
That's the conferencing model of Liggett-Stashower, a Cleveland, Ohio-based advertising agency that uses Lotus Sametime to communicate with its clients. Laura Jenson, vice president of information systems, acknowledges that it took time for her company to maximize its success with Sametime and to save the anticipated time and money. "Online collaboration is very different than real-world meetings. Online you must be fully prepared and organized," she advises. "Have all your files available and let the moderators decide how to run the meeting. Never force the technology on anyone. Let them come to it in their own time."
