My office is involved in a collaborative project with universities in Jordan and Israel. To cut costs, we have adopted Skype for making international phone calls and conference calls. The addition of one-to-one video calling has been a great help as well.
We were going to have a call with one of our Jordanian partners in which we were discussing satellite images of agricultural land use. Rather than email the graphics to the other person, and then talking over the phone, I loaded the images to Vyew and sent him an invitation. Using the drawing tools, I highlighted the relevant features on the maps before the call, and then we were able to use the Arrow tool to point out these features as they were discussed.
For two-party calling, we were successful in our video and audio conference with the live Vyew document. When the time comes to edit our quarterly report, I plan to use the live desktop sharing feature to display the document for real-time editing.
I like the fact that we were able to run a meeting between participants half a world away using tools that are free of charge! Maybe I can get a better laptop with the money we are not spending on Centra or LiveMeeting. )
