Left-Handed Complement
mudge’s musings
Tags: global, collaboration, web conferencing
So, a good day, professionally. And I knew it by 10:00am.
Web Conferencing
That’s my thing, collaboration via the web. In this day of the public Web 2.0 this sounds routine, and pretty much a given, but not necessarily in a corporate environment. Here we’re protected by firewalls with fierce bulldogs of security types to maintain and defend them. And most of all, we corporate types are often hemmed in by our “we do it this way because we always do it this way” leg irons. I support web conferencing for my employer, and have done so pretty much full time for nearly five years, filling a need, and a niche no one really knew existed. I teach our technology (on-line of course), participate on the technical team that supports the tool, and facilitate key meetings. Today’s meeting wasn’t key per se, but it was important to the people who organized it and thus to me. An attorney came into headquarters from Germany to discuss arcane, but important, legal issues for a small group of our corporate attorneys here. We supported the meeting via web conferencing, which in our hybrid world means a conventional telephone conference augmented with a web conference loaded up with the speaker’s presentation. I sat at the rear of the room, having spent a little while earlier in the morning taking in the speaker’s presentation in email and converting it to a format enabling efficient transmission on line. While the presenter advanced the presentation slides on his laptop connected to the meeting room’s projector, I mirrored his actions in the web conference, enabling the remote attendees to see what the people in the meeting room could see. Nothing that wasn’t ordinary. Except the participant list. This little meeting, one of dozens running at the same time in our organization, had a very small list of on-line participants. From Ohio, California, Canada, and Southeast Asia, where the meeting began at 2100 hrs, 9:00pm! Call me naïve, but I continue to be impressed that I’m able to assist our global enterprise to be global. And it made my day. How very un-mudge of me! Thanks!–mudge
Posted by mudge 
