An Introduction To Web Based Audio Conferencing Solutions.Generally the businesses use services provided by professional conference call companies as the audio conferencing solutions where professional purposes are concerned. However if you want the audio conferencing solutions for casual use and do not want to pay too much, it is recommended that you look for web based audio conferencing solutions. Most of the services that are provided here are free of the cost if you want to do a PC to PC audio conference. There are a number of popular solutions like Skype, Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger and Microsoft Netmeeting. All these are available free of cost and the non Microsoft softwares are also available for platforms other than Microsoft Windows. If you want to connect to non PC users who use a cellphone or a traditional fixed line PSTN telephone, you should have to purchase a calling card. The calling cards allow you to connect to anyone on the telephone using the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service. The cards are very economical when compared to the telephone conference call and if you are calling overseas, the savings are just exponential. The main drawback of these web conferencing services is that unless you are going to call someone using a calling card, you must contact the person beforehand so that he may be ready to get in the conference when you invite him. On the other hand if you are calling to someone using a calling card on his phone, you do not need to make any before call preparation. The person can attend to a call on his cellphone almost anytime provided it is switched on. Apart from this when you use this systems you tend to loose on a number of other aspects. First of all, you loose the ease of recording and archiving calls. Since it might be required that sometimes even informal calls have to be recorded. Unless you use separate recording software or plug-in, you might not be able to record the calls. The professional solutions allow one touch call recording in most cases. Secondly, you also have to become a self support engineer. The professional telephone conference systems come with support features like reservationless conferencing and the companies also provide technical support. On the other hand the free systems do not come with any dedicated tech support. Rather it becomes necessary that if something goes wrong with the audio conferencing solutions, you have to sort it out yourself. If you are technically sound enough and if you are ready to deploy other solutions for recording features etc, you should go for these web and VoIP based audio conferencing solutions. The ability of free conference calling can easily beat even the best features by the conference call companies. |