Finally, Web Collaboration Everyone Can Use — for Free

One of the enduring features of an Old Economy is the large amount of physical stuff that gets shipped around in order to get things done (printed documents, people). Yes, in the end some physical objects do have to be loaded up and delivered. After all, factories and homes are built with physical bricks, and people eat physical food. Still, looking around southern Africa, it is amazing the amount of stuff that gets shipped physically from one place to another. This includes people — shipping themselves to meetings, training courses and the like. In our business it is not unusual to have several people fly all the way from Kasane to Gaborone for a 2 hour training session, or drive 4-6 hours one way to Gaborone for a meeting. In an earlier post we introduced YouSendIt, a free file upload service that eliminates the insane physical delivery of electronic documents. Today we offer Yugma, a free solution that can help your organization eliminate unnecessary physical shipments of people all over the place.

The principle is the same — why spend on cars, buses, plane flights, fuel, hotels, lunches and the like when the same meeting can be accomplished using the Web — for which you’re already paying a fixed price? Traditionally, the way to avoid this was to invest in expensive dedicated video-conferencing facilities and high speed dedicated telecom links, which look good in the boardroom but get used only occasionally. However, if your finances constrain you from adopting this solution, alternatives are meagre.

But now, the combination of broadband Internet, Skype, and Yugma brings practical online conferencing and collaboration to — well — practically everyone. If you are not already familiar with Skype, contact us and we will show you how you can virtually eliminate your phone bill by using this amazing voice application. Yugma is an even more impressive online collaboration application that allows you to connect to other people online and then show them your computer’s desktop — even letting them click on and manipulate objects such as documents on your computer’s screen. With Skype providing the audio connection, the result is that you and your remote colleagues can participate in corporate training sessions, review and edit documents together simultaneously, and do many of the sort of things they would normally hop onto a plane or a car for.

There are necessarily some pre-requisites for this solution to work well. Top on the list is that you must have access to sufficient Internet bandwidth. Going by our observations around southern Africa, this is not always guaranteed — either because the “broadband” links really aren’t broad (blame the telcos and ISPs), because they are expensive, because organizations do not manage their Internet resources well, and because many are skimping on this potentially very effective resource.

Yugma and Skype eliminate the cost of the platform as an excuse. Both are free and provide impressive free services, backed up by even more impressive premium services. The free version of Yugma, for example, allows you to connect up to 10 people using an Internet browser, with whom you can share your desktop including viewing and annotating the same copy of a document. Seamless integration with Skype means that you can establish a two-way teleconference with your audience. The premium version adds larger audiences (even 500 people), lets you select presenters from any of your remote users, and allows you to record a session (say as a training tool). Sessions can be scheduled in advance. And because Yugma runs on Java (supporting Windows, Macs, and Linux), you do not need to install any special software package. We have used this tool to collaborate effectively with clients and partners as far away as the US and Europe. We shudder to think what that kind of travel would have done to our bottom line, or alternately to our ability to deliver the result. Long-distance collaboration has never been easier!

If you’d like us to show you how these tools can help your organization put the Internet to work and save your truly valuable resources, click here to let us know. And if you have used Yugma or other web collaboration solutions, we’d love to hear about your experience.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 13th, 2007 at 11:58 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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