Microsoft Web Conferencing Solutions | Microsoft Office 365 | Microsoft Office Live Meeting | for your Business

Microsoft® offers a variety of Web Conferencing Solutions each providing significant benefits and increased productivity for your business. Their two main conferencing solutions are Microsoft® Office 365 and Microsoft® Office Live Meeting. Going with a trusted and established service provider like Microsoft guarantees the reliability and support necessary to keep your business at peak performance 24/7.

Microsoft Office 365 provides an all-inclusive cloud-based desktop suite with all the collaboration tools modern-day businesses demand. Microsoft’s ever-trustworthy application bundle, Office 365 is now available in the cloud offering simplicity and ease of use like never before. Packing in tested and retested web applications; Office 365 puts forth combinations of Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft® SharePoint®, Microsoft® Lync®, and Microsoft Office Professional Plus.

• Microsoft Exchange Online – Provides the top-notch reliability and security today’s businesses require, Exchange offers business-grade calendar, contacts, and email hosted through the cloud allowing accessibility via web browser, phone, and PC. This professional and easy-to-use service works from virtually anywhere and settings allow for automatic updates and feeds on the internet connected devices you use most often.


• Microsoft SharePoint Online – Efficient and productive collaboration requires accessibility for colleagues and customers alike to share and store information using brand-able secure custom sites. This simple process maintains documents are kept up to date and easy to access important information online while still preserving security over critical applications.


• Microsoft Lync Online – Lync Online allows quick and easy accessibility to those you need to connect with through online meetings, Lync video calls, or instant messaging. Enabling you to connect from practically anywhere, Lync allows you to conduct online meetings, share presentations, desktops and whiteboards all with the convenience of click-to-communicate utilities.


• Microsoft Office Professional Plus – Offering a practical productivity inducing platform, Office Professional Plus allows use and functionality of the powerful Microsoft Office applications from almost anywhere. Office Professional Plus streamlines communications allowing quicker finding and sharing of important data. This service provides constant access to the latest versions of each individual application.

Microsoft Office Live Meeting similarly allows effortless interaction with web conferencing audiences. Live Meeting provides an array of standard features all expediting your business interactions including personal recordings, 24/7 support and assistance, availability in a variety of languages, application sharing, responsive annotation tools, questions and answers, and powerful post meeting reports. With a wide range of functions and benefits Microsoft Office Live Meeting provides a streamlined and efficient conferencing solution for your business.

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Source: http://www.conferenceshopper.com/microsoft-web-conferencing-solutions

Benefits of Using Web Conferencing Services for Business Communication

Web conferencing offers many substantial benefits ranging from simplified file sharing to huge savings.

Web conferencing services have evolved and simplified many aspects of the way we do business today. Conferencing services facilitate much easier communication while noticeably reducing infrastructure and operating costs.

Web conferencing services are effective, regardless of location, in providing benefits as savings, reduced travel, environmentally efficient, increased productivity, effortless application and desktop sharing, simplified employee training, and improved customer relations.

• Savings – Savings are immediate and come in the form of financial savings and time savings, which are both very advantageous for your business.
• Reduced Travel – Reductions in travel only increase the savings. Less travel means reduced airfare, rental cars, fuel, hotel accommodations, and costly time spent on the road.
• Environmental Efficiency – Environmentally friendly additions are only becoming more important in today’s business world. Along with the financial savings associated with reduced travel, with web conferencing services it’s never been easier to reduce your carbon footprint.
• Increased Productivity – Reductions in travel save you costly time on the road. Decreasing travel time immediately decreases downtime and efficiently increases productivity. Along with reduced travel time, which directly decreases downtime, web conferencing allows demos and tutorials to be done online saving time that you would have previously had to spend coordinating with employees, customers, and clients.
• Effortless Application and Desktop Sharing – The simplicity of sharing Excel® spreadsheets and PowerPoint® presentations is a key advantage of web conferencing maintaining that everyone stays on the same page regardless of location and distance between employees.
• Simplified Employee Training – Continuing to tally up the savings, there’s no longer a need to gather employees in a single location for training. Through the use of web conferencing services, consistency is guaranteed as employees are given the same information at the same time. Web conferencing provides a simplified method of reaching any number of people in various locations across the nation or across the world.
• Improved Customer Relations – With increased accessibility, maintaining customer support and relations has never been easier. The ability to share desktops makes communication that much easier since everyone’s literally on the same page. Also, companies are able to take control of a client’s computer and fix problems in a much more time-friendly and efficient fashion.

Web conferencing services from various conferencing providers offer simplified communication regardless of location and could be the solution you’ve been searching for. For more information on the perfect web conferencing service for your business contact a Conference Shopper representative today!

Web conferencing services

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Source: http://www.conferenceshopper.com/benefits-of-using-web-conferencing-services

Find the Best Audio, Web and Video Conferencing Service Providers for your Business

In these tough economic times, conferencing services are able to maintain a strong position in the marketplace, mainly due to the fact that they allow businesses to do more with less. Today’s audio, video, and web conferencing services offer a way for businesses to connect with participants located anywhere in the world at any time – all from the comfort and convenience of their desk, tablet and/or smartphone and for a fraction of the price.

According to the Cisco® Visual Networking Index: Forecast and Methodology, 2011-2016, web-based videoconferencing was more than 56% of total business video conferencing traffic in 2011, and is expected to grow faster than overall business videoconferencing, at a CAGR of 45%. Consequently, a sea of web conferencing providers has flooded the market in an effort to capitalize on the growing customer base. While this helps to drive costs down, it also makes choosing the right provider for your needs a daunting task. Just typing in the phrase, “web conference provider” in Google pulls up over 74.5 million results!

With such a large number of web conferencing providers inundating the market, finding the right provider for your unique needs is tricky, but not impossible. Here are a few questions you should be asking ask your prospective providers:

• Who is their target customer
• Do they provide more than just the technology
• How reliable is their solution
• What kind of support do they offer

Like many telecommunications services, some providers choose to cater their solutions to specific sizes or types of businesses. This can mean great pricing, but only if your company fits the bill. On the other hand, providers like InterCall® and PGi – two of the world’s largest conferencing providers – offer comprehensive collections of solutions that can be customized to suit your unique needs and budget, whatever they may be.

It’s also important to look for a provider that offers more than just the technology, as it can only take you so far. In order to get the best return on your web conferencing investment you need to know the ins and outs of your solution. This includes setting agendas, mastering available features, as well as numerous other ways to make your virtual meetings as productive and effective as possible.

Reliability is essential, as the service you choose to employ is a direct reflection on you and your company. That being said, bulky interfaces, poor sound quality and/or a lack of compatibility (i.e. necessary plug-ins, browser limitations, etc.) can kill a meeting. See if the provider you’re considering can provide customer reviews or if they offer free service trials to test for yourself.

Lastly, make sure they offer 24/7 support. Every conference presenter has encountered a meeting issue, even the most experienced ones. Finding a resolution as soon as possible is key to keeping your meeting under control and on track. Thankfully, providers such as the above mentioned InterCall and PGi offer 24 hour support 7 days a week – and in multiple forms. For example, PGi offers assistance via phone, email, and live chat.

Source: http://www.conferenceshopper.com/web-conferencing-service-providers

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WebEx Web Conferencing Solution For Effective and Engaging Business Meetings

The most precious asset of today's successful business leaders is their time. Numerous studies have shown that most of that time is reportedly spent in meetings, and yet more than 50% of participants feel that time is often wasted. So much so that they would prefer to collaborate almost any other way.

Cisco WebEx recently surveyed more than 800 knowledge workers about their conferencing experiences, and the results were surprising.

Although the survey participants reported they spend more time in meetings than any other form of communication, only 1 in 10 prefer to interact via conferencing. Why? The other 9 cited three major issues: required participants not showing up, not having clear agenda, and a lack of accomplishing goals/tasks. But this doesn't have to be the case! These are all issues that a modern web conferencing solution, such as WebEx, can fix.

With WebEx, scheduling engaging and collaborative meetings with your attendees is as simple as a click of the mouse. Wherever you are, whenever you'd like, WebEx will bring your entire team together with ease. Once in your personally customizable virtual meeting room, all of your participants view the same information at the same time, while still being able to see each other face-to-face via webcam. In addition, your team will have access to a robust list of features, including white boarding, Q&A, polling, and more.

For those working out of the office, WebEx is available on smartphones and tablets, allowing your team to build stronger relationships and get more work done regardless of their location. WebEx also offers the ability for you to record your meeting, so you and your participants can revisit the material at your leisure. This is a valuable feature because it allows those who were unable to attend your meeting (such as sick, mobile, or geographically dispersed workers in multiple time zones) to view the exact same material, just as if they were there live.

When executed properly, virtual conferences can energize your participants, tap the full range of their talents, and deliver powerful and effective results – all while saving you money! To find out more about today's conferencing services, feel free to browse our site or give one of our professional account managers a call today Conference Shopper is an online one-stop shop for all types of conferencing services.

WebEx Web Conferencing Solutions, Web Conferencing Services

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Tips for A More Effective and Engaging Web Conference

Web conferencing is an effective, cost-efficient and convenient method of communicating and collaborating with your geographically dispersed employees and customers. Today, web conferences are available on almost any device and used for many purposes, including staff training sessions, shareholder meetings, product launches, marketing services – even interviewing potential employees.

However, even though web conferencing eliminates the hassle and costs associated with business travel, your conference will still require the same amount of forethought and effort as an in-person meeting for it to be valuable and a constructive use of time for both you and your participants. Thankfully, there are a number of things that you can do to help deliver engaging material that will keep your attendees focused and actively participating in your meeting, such as:

• Recruit an assistant – having an additional person to introduce speakers and lead Q&A sessions helps to not only streamline the flow of your conference, but also aids in keeping your participants focused by breaking up the monotony of a single speaker/presentation style

• Rehearse your presentation – stay away from reading directly off of a sheet of paper. Even if your participants cannot see you while presenting, they will be able to tell that your delivery is less than natural. In the event that you have a lot of material to cover and are worried about missing something, an outline is a great way to keep on topic. Bonus: you can also allot specific amounts of time to each topic on your outline to keep your conference on track

• Provide visuals – to get the best return on your web conferencing investment, be sure to utilize all of the tools and features that your service provides. And remember that graphs, charts and other visuals are a great way to make complex information easier to process.

• Avoid duplicating your speech and visuals – just as you should avoid reading directly off of a sheet of paper, make sure you also do not read directly off your PowerPoint slides. Instead, limit the text on your slides to a few key bullet points, which you can expand on while presenting

• Set aside time for Q&A sessions – generally these are held at the end of a conference provided it is 30 minutes or less. If it is over the 30 minute mark, you should allow for smaller Q&A sessions at breaking points throughout your meeting, for example, after each speaker or topic. This will permit your participants to address pertinent questions prior to moving on to more complex material, as opposed to saving all their questions until the very end of your conference when you’ve moved on to unrelated material

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Benefits of Employing Web Conferencing Services

Here at ConferenceShopper.com, we regularly talk about the multitude of benefits that web conferencing and web conferencing services offer, including:

• The ability to collaborate with any number of participants in multiple time zones in real-time
• Cost and time-savings by eliminating the expenses and time involved with business travel
• The ability to meet with your participants on short notice
• Improved work/life balance for your employees
• Reduced corporate carbon footprint
• Increased in-house productivity

Thanks to the productivity and business continuity it provides, Unified Communications (UC) is becoming more and more vital to today’s businesses. With that said, as UC services, such as web conferencing, continue to grow, businesses will find other value in the technology as well.

Recently, while speaking to industry analysts and reporters in San Francisco, Polycom’s CEO, Any Miller, spoke on the value of UC, saying that it “will move from ROI to business continuity and productivity. It’s no longer about the ROI of [conferencing] versus travel.”

Unfortunately, a number businesses have given conferencing services the brush off – partly because they are not aware of the advancements and features that are now available on modern conferencing services, and partly because they believe in-person meetings are the best/only way to get business done. To be sure, in-person meetings are a crucial part to forming a strong relationship with your dispersed customers and employees, however as Miller also pointed out, conferencing services ensure your business is not interrupted by natural disasters (anyone remember that Icelandic volcanic ash cloud in 2010 or last year’s earthquake and tsunami in Japan?), infectious diseases (H1N1, etc.), and post-9-11 airport security.

The fact is conferencing services (web conferencing in particular) provide a way for people to maintain a close relationship with their customers and colleagues, and has time and again proven to be an incredibly valuable asset to all types and sizes of businesses. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) – the leading worldwide provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the IT, telecom and consumer technology markets – the forecasted revenue from UC and collaboration technology is expected to grow at to $44 billion by 2015 for a compound annual growth rate of over 18 percent.

Additional Information

To find out more about audio and web conferencing services and how they can enhance your business, give us a call today!

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What Your Participants Could Be Doing During Your Conferences

Here at ConferenceShopper, we have discussed an abundance of ways that you can make the most of your meetings. Our blogs have offered tips and tricks on how you can increase your participant’s engagement as well as your meeting’s productivity levels. This week, we’re going to cover what your staff is likely doing during your web conference. Some of it you’d probably expect, but others may come as a surprise.

• Checking email – Radicati Group research shows that the average business person sends approximately 34 emails and receives 99 emails every day. While there’s no doubt that the majority of those are coming in during the work day, chances are at least a few are being sent and received throughout the duration of your audio or web conference.
• Browsing the Internet – this includes researching work-related material, shopping, reading news articles or books, and going to social media websites (such as LinkedIn and FaceBook) which account for over 20% of American’s time spent online.
• Texting – according to Pew Internet, the typical person sends around 40 text messages daily. Assuming those texts come in during a 15 hour day, that equates to three texts being sent by each of your participants during your conference.
• Private chats – no, we aren’t talking about the handy chat and sub-chat features that come with most web conferencing services. We’re talking about those participants that put their line on mute and then answer their cell phone during your meeting or converse with co-workers that stop by their desk.
• Eating – a late breakfast, snack, lunch, or even an early dinner.
• Exercising – while this is a good idea for your participant’s health, there’s an even better chance it’ll keep them from focusing on your materials.
• Personal grooming – this includes participants brushing their hair or teeth (perhaps after grabbing a bite to eat), clipping/filing/painting their nails, shaving, putting on make-up, etc.
• Housework – this counts mainly for mobile workers and those who work from home, and includes cooking, cleaning, organizing, playing with/talking to/cleaning up after pets and children.

In accordance with a study that was conducted by Stanford University, people who multi-task would accomplish more if they did each task individually as opposed to simultaneously. So, while your participants might think they can multi-task successfully, research shows they would probably do even better by slowing down and directing more focus toward each task.

What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever done during an audio or web conference?


Source: Web Conferencing Services