Unified Comms > VideoconferencingEssentials

Using teleconferencing technology has lately become an obvious and financially practical choice to offset rising business travel expenses. Yet sometimes simple chatting doesn't cut it. There has been growing interest in the notion of online conferencing with a "virtual presence" emphasis, which enables people to share information and their very selves with one another with a stronger sense of near-tangible "face time."

Former pro basketball superstar Earvin "Magic" Johnson recently gave a ringing testimonial on the value of high-definition videoconferencing technology to his business and charitable work.

Telepresence, the high-end form of videoconferencing now coming from several vendors, is the first technology that might let enterprises easily record high-quality versions of all their meetings, essentially with the press of a button.

Consumer products giant Procter & Gamble wants to be the most collaborative company in the world.

Search engine Google has launched Gmail voice and video chat, making it possible for people around the world to chat in high-quality video for free within Gmail.

Networking professionals have been hearing a lot about the coming of videoconferencing to their computing environments for a long time. Until now, at least, the talk hasn't translated into the actual number of deployments most vendors have been hoping for.

With the rise in adoption and availability of enterprise videoconferencing systems comes a warning from IT pioneers: Thinking this technology is simply plug-and-play will lead to disaster.

Consider this: In the week following September 11, 2001, your users were glued to their television sets tracking breaking news. If an event of similar proportions happened today, they would expect the enterprise network to be able to handle not only real-time video feeds but also high-definition videoconferences and surveillance, as well as instant access to social-networking tools.

Here are 10 tips network managers should follow for a successful video deployment.