Virtual meeting space

Meetings have many purposes: discussion, collaboration, decision-making… but suffer from a number of issues including creating a need to travel, being deferred due to schedule constraints, running out of time, not having all relevant information available. Audio conferencing and video conferencing can help but do not provide a satisfactory alternative on their own.

Desktop videoconferencing deployed with collaborative tools for reviewing presentations and other documents can provide a rich user experience for a virtual meeting. But this is only one option.

So-called Web 2.0 technologies provide collaborative tools that can be easily deployed in user-friendly and user-definable web portals. These tools include wikis (online knowledge bases worked on collaboratively), blogs (online commentary tool enabling feedback by readers), and mash-ups (applications created by bringing together data and applications from many sources). The effect is a bottom-up approach to knowledge management and collaboration. Benefits include flexibility and the ability for workers to communicate and collaborate at a time that suits each of them.

Inflexible company intranets can be replaced by these technologies relatively quickly.