Web-Style Audience Responses in Real-World Meetings

Traditional thinking tends to always favor in-person meetings and training over virtual Web-based replacements. Most people would say that while Web-based meetings and conferences have their place, especially when travel is difficult or too expensive, in most areas they fall behind a face-to-face meeting.

But anyone who has used Web-based conferencing extensively knows that there are certain advantages over real-world meetings and conferences that extend beyond the travel savings. And one of the biggest is the ability to instantly quiz and poll meeting and conference attendees to track their knowledge and grasp of the information being presented. This kind of real-time feedback can be invaluable when it comes to customizing and even changing presentations on the fly.

And it is also much harder to gather in person. In small meetings you can ask for a show of hands, but this doesn't work with complex questions and there's the reality that people will change their vote to match the rest of the group rather than be the only person without a hand up. And when it comes to auditorium-sized conferences and training, shows of hands are pretty much useless.

If you're lucky enough to work in a modern university environment, or have a business with advanced and dedicated training facilities, you may have access to audience response systems built into seats and desks. But these are very expensive to deploy and can't be taken to any conference room or meeting environment.

This problem is why I was interested in trying out Turning Technologies' ResponseCard AnyWhere, part of its TurningPoint Response System.

Video: The Future of Unified Communications

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Unified communications has become a very hot topic for enterprise IT operations. The ability to combine and easily manage all forms of voice and digital communications within a company clearly offers huge cost and time savings benefits.

The importance of this field can be seen by the number of major vendors jumping into the Unified Communications arena.

But unified communications has been slow to take off. In this eWEEK video interview, Ashley Daley talks to eWEEK's Chief Technology Analyst Jim Repoza about the future of Unified Communications.

Click here to see the video interview of a look at unified communications

Can the Videoconferencing Boom Last?

It's a familiar story line. Whenever travel becomes too expensive or difficult, there's a deluge of stories about how business travel will become a thing of the past and how everyone will be meeting and doing face-to-face sit-downs via videoconferencing.

Whenever this happens, there's a rush to invest in videoconferencing systems, which see heavy use for a time. And then, as the economy improves or travel once again becomes affordable, these videoconferencing rooms see less and less use, and people once again start doing their meetings in person.

Right now we are clearly once again in a boom phase for videoconferencing. With the high cost of travel and rising energy costs, many businesses are once again taking a very hard look at implementing videoconferencing solutions in the hope of cutting down on travel costs and improving worker productivity.

But the question is, Can this current generation of videoconferencing maintain the momentum of this current cycle and remain a fixture of modern business life or will it once again fade into the background when (or if) travel once again becomes affordable?

Google Wants to Make the Web More Lively

Three-dimensional virtual-reality-based social networking! Just saying it can make you want to cringe. Didn't we already go through this with "Second Life" and its ilk?

We all know the problems. Most of these programs like "Second Life" are big fat applications, essentially video games. They have a high learning curve that discourages casual users. And they don't integrate well with Web sites and other social networking tools.

But what if instead of a big fat application you had a small browser plug-in? And what if it had a relatively low learning curve? And instead of people being forced into a big virtual world in order to connect, customized virtual spaces could be easily dropped into Web sites and collaboration systems? With that you might actually have a 3-D virtual-reality-based social networking system that people and businesses would embrace.

This is the concept behind Lively, which was just released as a beta by Google. Lively runs as a plug-in to Firefox and Internet Explorer and with it sites, businesses and people can quickly get up and running with virtual spaces that enable avatar-based collaboration, chat and social networking.

Adobe Reader Gets Connected

REVIEW: Just about a week after Adobe released version 9 of Acrobat, the latest version of the tool that most people use to read PDF files was also released. For most users, Adobe Reader 9 won't seem like a major departure from the previous versions of the free PDF reading tool.

The interface has been streamlined a bit, making it simpler to view multiple page PDF files. And search can be easily done across multiple PDF files.

However, the majority of the new features for Adobe Reader 9 fit into two camps: increased integration with the Acrobat.com Web site and support for new features introduced in Acrobat 9 (click here to read my review of Acrobat 9).

Acrobat 9: The Web/Desktop Hybrid for Documents

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REVIEW: When it comes to document collaboration and sharing, there can be little argument that most of this activity is moving to the web. But there can also be little argument that the current slate of Web-based tools come up short in features and capabilities when compared to desktop tools.

Perhaps what is needed is a hybrid approach, something that combines the strong feature set of a desktop application with the easy collaboration of a web-based approach. If this is truly the case, then Adobe may be on the right track.

That's because the latest release of their flagship Acrobat document platform is definitely focused on combining Acrobat's strong document editing and creation features with broad web-based collaboration, sharing and conferencing tools.

To do this Acrobat 9, which was released in June, relies heavily on the recently released Acrobat.com to provide web-based collaboration and sharing tools, as well as leveraging other products from the Adobe portfolio to add conferencing and live document reviewing features. And while there are few completely new capabilities in the core Acrobat feature set, many of been overhauled and improved to such a degree that they feel like completely new features.

WordPress 2.5 Is Top Choice for Blogging

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With the recent release of WordPress 2.5, the popular open-source blogging application has greatly improved its already good administration and blogging management interface and has made it much easier for bloggers to add widgets and do extensive customizations of their blogs. That's right, the best blogging platform just got better.

WordPress 2.5 represents the first major overhaul of the administration interface in a long time and while I never hated the old interface, I have to admit that this new one is a major improvement. Based on the improvements in this release, on top of the already very strong capabilities of WordPress, it's become even clearer that for anyone planning to start a new blog or looking to change platforms, WordPress should be the first choice.

To test WordPress 2.5 I launched brand new blogs and also upgraded existing WordPress installations to the new version. For clean installations everything went very smoothly and the blogging platform continued to live up to the promise of its 5-minute installation process.

Facebook Boosts Privacy Controls

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While I was an early adopter of many social networks, over the last year I've found myself using them less and less, and this has applied especially to Facebook.

One of the big problems I've run into with Facebook is that, while my early use was pretty much limited to friends and family, over the last year I've had more and more business and professional contacts wanting to connect over Facebook. This had made me less likely to use Facebook freely, especially when it came to sending out personal information meant for friends but not for business contacts.

My main solution to this issue had been to lock everyone who wasn't a close friend into my limited profile, giving these Facebook contacts only the most minimal view of my Facebook information. But in many ways this is a pretty blunt instrument as it doesn't allow different levels of access for different levels of professional contacts.

But finally Facebook has updated their service to provide greater control over the levels of access one provides to their variety of friends and contacts. Recently it became possible within Facebook to set different privacy controls based on customer created friend lists.

Lunarr Turns a New Page for Task Collaboration

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Have you ever walked into a meeting or presentation and been given a printed handout? And during the meeting, did you flip the handout over and start taking notes on the back of the document, maybe even passing it to a co-worker who added notes of his or her own?

In the most basic sense, this is the idea behind Lunarr. Lunarr adds a Web-based back page to any content submitted into the system, whether it's a Microsoft Word document, PDF, Lunarr-created document, or any Web page or application.

Of course, Lunarr's back page holds quite a bit more than notes and doodles. It contains every e-mail sent or received pertaining to that document, information on every version and revision of the document, links to every external document or Web site related to that document, and a list of every person who has collaborated on that document.

This might seem like a simple concept, but it's pretty much the exact opposite of the way most document-based collaboration and task management takes place. In the classic (and most common) e-mail-based collaboration, there is limited or no control over the versioning and integrity of the core document being collaborated on, and users can find it difficult to track all the e-mails and discussions related to that document.

LiquidPlanner Helps Manage Project Uncertainty

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"Bob, when can your team deliver the prototype of the new product?"

"March 22," says Bob.

Bob's response to this question is based on lots of hard information, from his knowledge of the task at hand to his experience with his team to performance on similar projects in the past. But it's still just a guess. And every milestone, deliverable and sub-task scheduled for that project will also be a guess.

But that's the way project management works. Everything has a due date, and, when a team doesn't meet that date, members feel like they failed, which can lead to poor morale and even more missed deadlines.

The funny thing is, almost nothing else in the world works that way. For the most part, uncertainty is a key aspect of scheduling. For example, the cable installer doesn't tell you he'll be at your house at exactly 11:45 a.m. He says he'll be there sometime between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.

However, while uncertainty may be a fact of life, project management traditionally has not tolerated it at all.