3 Ways to Meet Remotely

You have choices when you meet remotely today. But is the way you’re choosing to meet serving you best? Let’s take a look at some options: video calling, online meetings, and video conferencing.

Video calling sends audio and video right over the Internet (voice over IP, or VoIP). VoIP has gotten better, but it’s still subject to the whims of the Internet and is, therefore, less reliable. There are plenty of apps for video calling—new ones seem to be popping up every day. And video calling is being used more and more for business purposes. But when professionalism is on the line, these apps may not be the best choice.

Online meetings also send audio and video right over the Internet, but the audio and video are integrated into a service, increasing quality. And with WebEx online meetings and some others in the space, you get a whole environment in your meeting experience that allows for collaboration. You get screen sharing so you can work on documents together—and you can share you whole screen or just one app or file and keep everything else private. You also get markup tools, so you can edit the documents you share. You can access online meetings from a web browser or from a vendor’s app. WebEx Meetings is a super easy app that works with most operating systems.

Video conferencing is known by industry standards as conferencing that happens through a video “on-premise” endpoint such as the big monitor in a video conferencing room. But the term is also being adopted by the general public to lump all of these remote meeting technologies with video into one; increasingly “video conferencing” just means a meeting in which you see someone remotely through video, and niceties about whether this is an online meeting, a video call, or a video conference, are getting lost.

Cisco WebEx video conferencing (service and hardware) are interoperable with WebEx online meetings, and people join from video systems in rooms or on desks, from browsers, and from most mobile devices.

When you’re looking to meet remotely, video calling, online meetings, and video conferencing are all options. Video calling is incredibly easy to use, but it may not be your best bet for reliability. You may want to look to online meetings and video conferencing for better audio and video quality.