The Cloud Makes It Rain Money: The Business in Cloud Computing - Deploying and Managing a Cloud Infrastructure - page 362

The six defining benefits of telepresence are as follows:
■ Reduced travel expenditure
■ Reduced carbon footprint and environmental impact
■ Improved employee work and life balance
■ Accelerated problem resolution
■ Improved customer service
■ Improved productivity
Rather than traveling to have face-to-face meetings, telepresence is now common in the
industry for collaborating and managing projects. It uses a multiple-codec audio/video sys-
tem in which each member or party dials in to join a call. This brings huge time and cost
benefits and greatly enhances the interaction during conferencing. For instance, a speaker
has tools available to present slides or show videos or animated presentations to the audi-
ence and engage them in real time. This is superior to phone conferencing, where audio is
the only means to share information.
Teleconferencing and videoconferencing are the most popular forms of telepresence
technology. They deploy a degree of technical sophistication and require improved fidelity
of both audio and video. Technical advancements have extended telepresence capabilities to
handheld mobile devices such as tablets. Although these mobile devices are still less reliable
and lack the professional practicality of a true videoconferencing boardroom, they do offer
a location-independent alternative.
With the cloud becoming ubiquitous and companies having resources (both manpower
and infrastructure) spread over vast geographical areas, teleconferencing has become an
everyday tool for meetings, collaboration, and management. The most popular teleconfer-
encing tools used by the industry are listed here:
Microsoft Lync Figure 12.3 shows Lync, formerly called Office Communicator, which is
a teleconferencing client used with Microsoft Lync Server or Lync Online. It is part of the
Microsoft Office suite and include features such as instant messaging, VoIP, videoconferenc-
ing with multiple users, contact book, onscreen document viewing, desktop sharing, docu-
ment sharing, whiteboards, and collaboration through PowerPoint sharing. The downside is
that there is a limit to how many people can join a call (typically 250).
Adobe Acrobat Connect Acrobat Connect (Figure 12.4), from Adobe, is similar to
Microsoft Lync. It is a powerful videoconferencing tool that includes a number of useful
features comparable to Lync's. The upside is that a user can host a videoconference with a
virtually unlimited number of people. However, compatibility issues with documents other
than PDFs become a nuisance.
Skype Skype (Figure 12.5) is a free service for one-to-one videoconferencing. It offers
standard features such as instant messaging, VoIP, videoconferencing, file sharing, and
screen viewing, but only for one-to-one calls. To participate in multiparty videoconferenc-
ing, users need to pay for the service. However, there are no supported options for desktop
sharing and whiteboards. Moreover, Skype's messaging system is not very reliable and
often has problems with the correct sequence of messages between people who are present
in different time zones.