Business travel has taken a beating in the past few years from the 1-2-3-4 punch of the September 11 terrorist attacks, the recession, the SARS epidemic, and the war in Iraq. The number of business trips Americans took fell almost 7 percent from 2001 to 2002 and dropped a further 4 percent in 2003, according to the Travel Industry Association of America. Not only have companies slashed travel budgets, even for travel-dependent departments such as sales and marketing, but people have also become less enthusiastic about spending time aboard airplanes.

Yet we live in a global economy, and people in far-flung locations still need to meet. Increasingly, they're doing so via Web conferencing services, which let both small and large groups of people share presentations and documents in real time over the Web. The services also deliver handy tools for collaboration, including chat rooms, whiteboards, document annotation, application sharing, Web polls, and Web tours. With most of the services, the audio portion of the conference is handled via standard phone conferencing.

Given the cost savings that Web conferencing can deliver, the market is positioned to take off in the next few years, growing from $544 million in 2003 to $2.2 billion by 2007, predicts the Radicati Group, a consulting and market research firm.
"Web conferencing emerged as a renegade application," says Andy Nilssen, senior analyst for Wainhouse Research. "Any-one with a browser, an Internet connection, and a credit card could fire up a Web conference without special equipment or the blessing of senior management." Increasingly, however, companies are embracing the technology not only to reduce travel expenses but also to speed up decision making by allowing the right people to collaborate instantly, no matter where they happen to be.

Web seminars, or Webinars, are also taking off for everything from sales events to education. The conferencing vendors are responding with tighter security, including SSL encryption, management tools for administrators, and installed solutions that can be set up behind a corporate firewall. Webcasting reaches an even larger audience than Webinars by broadcasting a one-way Web presentation and often using content delivery networks such as Akamai and Digital Island for faster throughput. (For descriptions of some of these high-end solutions, see the sidebar "Conferencing for Big Business.")

We tested four leading Web conferencing services—Genesys Meeting Center, Microsoft Office Live Meeting, Raindance Web Conferencing Pro Seminar, and WebEx Meeting Center—as vehicles for small meetings and team collaboration. All of them offer the standard tools—Web-based PowerPoint presentations, document sharing and annotation, application sharing, whiteboarding, and chat—but they differ in multimedia features, meeting management tools, and integration with telephone conferencing.

Only Genesys and WebEx could show slide transitions, play the audio and video integrated with our test PowerPoint slide presentation, and conduct live videoconferencing. Genesys and WebEx were also the only services that could connect the names of Web participants with the telephone numbers they used to dial into the audio conference, easily allowing presenters to mute, unmute, and dismiss callers through a Web console.

We also found variations in the meeting management tools used to assign moderators, presenters, and attendees, and to grant individual rights to annotation and application sharing during the conference. In these capabilities, WebEx stood out as the most complete service.

Microsoft's acquisition of PlaceWare and the addition of Office to the name of its Live Meeting service signals the company's strategy of integrating Web conferencing with other desktop Office applications. But WebEx offers the best integration right now, with a download that lets you start a Web conference and share documents directly from Office applications, such as Excel or PowerPoint, or by right-clicking on a document file. All but Raindance can integrate scheduling and conference initiation with Microsoft Outlook. And both Genesys and WebEx let you start a Web conference from your instant-messaging window.

Eventually, Web conferencing may become just another feature within other productivity applications. But if you want to meet on the Web today, you need one of the services we review here.

Copyright © 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in PC Magazine.