Web conference service selection criteria

In considering potential web conferencing services there are many features and trade offs that balance competitive price with functionality and functionality with need. Since the web conferencing architecture doesn't require more than a web browser to participate nor more than a credit card to have an account, it is often difficult to assure enterprise control and enforcement of a strategic service relationship.

Nevertheless, there are real business needs and important features required for certain applications of web conferencing. This article reviews the features required and recommended for prospect education events, product demonstrations and web collaboration applications of web conferencing:

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Depending on the application of the web conferencing service, there are different needs as shown in the table below. Features are rated at four levels: not required (blank), Could Have (yellow), Must Have but not necessarily in this application (yellow) and Must Have

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There are two other factors that ought to be considered in any effective enterprise-wide decision process. Firstly, consider rating of customer support – how responsive is the customer support organization to technical difficulties? How often do they occur? How do subscribers get compensated for poor experiences (if at all)? Secondly, service stability & reliability – Unless the company publishes statistics on their system stability and reliability the only way to get a sense of this dimension of the service is to reach out to current customers. Asking them the frequency of problems and how the vendor responded is appropriate to getting a sense of how your organization will be treated.

Web conferencing services are a rapidly growing complement to the enterprise communications service infrastructure. Research by Brockmann & Company shows that the frequency and length of web conferences are expected to increase by 63% and 43%, respectively among users of the service today. This makes web conferencing one of the fastest growing collaboration capabilities of unified communications systems available today.

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