Webcam Meetings

These days small businesses are looking for any way possible to save money. This past week one of my projects was to setup a business meeting between two offices using webcams. Like most small business technology projects, my first criteria was to accomplish the task by spending as little money as possible.

Each office had a 1.3 megapixel Logitech webcam, like the one shown here. I would have preferred to use a Philips webcam with higher resolution, but they already had the Logitech cams, so that was what we decided to use.

Next, we had to determine what software to use. First we tried Microsoft's Netmeeting, but found it had poor audio quality and no full-screen picture option. We decided to give Skype a try and discovered that it performed well. I have not been a Skype user since Ebay became their parent company back in 2005. Ebay ripped me off once, so I usually avoid anything to do with them, but that's getting more difficult as they continue to buy up more trustworthy Internet companies.

The webcam was going to be connected to a laptop on one end, so I added a set of external speakers and a three channel microphone mixer. I placed the extra microphones on the conference table so that the smaller site could hear everyone at the larger site. The built-in webcam microphone proved to be adequate for the smaller group.

To make a long story short, the meeting was a success. It was as if the other site was sitting at the conference table and the technology was completely transparent, as it should be.