Video Conferencing

Are you looking for an appropriate web conferencing software solution for your organization? Do you know what factors to look for, in the software while buying it? The article below describes what are web conferencing software, and what are the different categories of web conference software.

Web conferencing software packages were introduced in 1994 as two freeware packages. Since then, they have become increasingly popular. Now, there are too many web conferencing software in the market, both as freeware and commercial product.

What is Web Conferencing Software? Web conferencing software is a type of video conferencing software that allows two or more participants, at different geographical locations, to share an audio/visual communication with each other, through a virtual video medium, with the help of their web browsers and servers.

How various web conferencing software are categorized? Broadly, there are five different groups in which the web conferencing software are categorized. Theses are centralized forum, groupware, bulletin board systems (BBS), Usenet and mailing list.

Centralized Forum web conferencing software are specially designed to serve the purpose of group discussions. These group discussions are treated as a part of ongoing conversation, and are stored on a centralized computer system. Another sub-group of this category is Well-Style web conferencing software. These categories of software structure group discussions, as linear chains of responses, and each discussion is displayed as a continuous stream of text.

Some examples of centralized forum software are Big Mouth Lion, Allaire Forum, Hyper News, Podium, etc., and some examples of Well-Style software are Caucus, COW, Back talk, Motet, and web crossing.

Groupware: Groupware software solutions not only support group discussions, but a lot many more activities such as document sharing and scheduling. Groupware products are either in the form of ready-made applications, or as toolboxes with customizable templates to create collaborative applications, for example, Oracle Inter Office, Web Share, Live Link, Lotus Domino, etc.

Bulletin Boards: These software packages are designed mainly to serve the purpose of swapping files. All the messages are treated as independent entities, and are posted in a centralized bulletin board. Later, discussions are carried as threaded discussions, for example, Spinnaker, World Group, Web Lines, etc.

Usenet: Usenet handles individual messages via separate news groups, and sorts the messages by their broad subject areas. For this, it either uses standardized protocols to format and transmit information, or messages or pass the messages from one news server to another or replicates them. Examples of Usenet are Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator.

Mailing List: It is an asynchronous, many-to-many medium, text-based from of web conferencing. E-mail is the smallest structured from of conferencing. Examples of mailing list are Hyper Mail, LW Gate and MhonArc.

Thus, we have seen there is a huge category of web conferencing software available in the market to choose from. Only after looking at these categories, and the web conferencing features they provide, one can make the best choice.