I had a demo of Fuze HD for iPad earlier this week, and have to say I’m pretty impressed, not just with the quality of the video — it shoots and displays 1080p HD video — but also the number of collaboration tools that are included. The app allows multiparty chat with up to 10 participants, as well as interoperability with a number of different high-end telepresence systems, ensuring that users can connect with colleagues and partners regardless of the hardware they use. It also gives them the option to record, display and share video directly from the tablet.

In addition to screen and video sharing, there’s also a ton of collaboration features built in, with users able to share documents and annotate them in real-time. FuzeBox has even built a touch-based laser pointer into the app so that users can highlight images or documents that they’re sharing.

The new display enables Retina-quality images and video, but Fuze for iPad HD also gets a speed boost from the new iPad’s 4G LTE connectivity. Users can download content about 10 times faster than before if they used cellular service, with uploads happening at twice the previous speeds over 3G. Latency has also been hugely reduced — it’s down by 50 percent, according to FuzeBox. That’ll ensure that video remains synced between users, which is ultra-important for video conferencing and collaboration.

With a new UI, FuzeBox has also increased language support on the iPad app, and now offers English, Chinese, Japanese, French, French Canadian, German, Italian, Korean, Russian and Spanish. That’s important, as its user base is increasingly international: FuzeBox says it now hosts 76,000 meetings a day in 122 different countries.

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This fear of distraction may be understandable, but it’s also misplaced according to a recent post on Management Issues by Wayne Turmel. Among several tips to keep team members engaged when communicating at a distance, Turmel suggests simply acknowledging that being far away can make us a bit paranoid. We demand more reassurance and attention from remote colleagues than we would ever expect face to face:

Just because they do something else for a moment doesn’t mean they’re not hanging in there. If you’ve never “zoned out” during a face-to-face meeting, you’re a better man than I, Gunga Din. Few of us are so riveted by what’s going on that we can’t do something else for a brief period then re-engage. Unless you’re specifically asking for their input, they will probably be back.

Turmel makes a great point about the insecurity that is born of working via the web rather than in person, but there are other reasons to stop stressing about getting your team’s undivided attention during remote meetings. Simply put, harnessing “backchannel” communications such as texting or tweeting, may work better than prohibiting them, whether you’re presenting in person or from 10,000 miles away.

For example, SXSW presenters Christopher Fahey and Timothy Meaney have argued on A List Apart that the old expectation of a passive, silent audience is out of date and speakers should aim to engage rather than enrapture their audiences. They focus is on traditional conference speakers but the point holds for those presenting or speaking remotely:

Conventional conference wisdom is that speakers are fighting a war for the audience’s attention. On one side, there’s the speaker, armed with beautiful slides, succinct bullet points, a commanding stage presence, and a great speech. On the other side is Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, YouTube, etc. The audience is in the middle, torn between datastreams.

The backchannel irritates many speakers. But giving the speaker the power to cut audiences off from the backchannel would be, we think, the wrong solution…. It’s time to empower the audience…. We need to react in meaningful ways. Not just clapping or booing, but actually communicating and conversing…. The model of the rapt audience so enthralled by a speaker that you can hear a pin drop actually prevents this kind of meaningful reaction.

Their solution is a Twitter-like app to allow audience members react to the speaker and each others’ comments in real time. But managers looking to utilize rather than suppress backchannel interactions on a conference call, for example, don’t need to invest in any special technology.

As we’ve covered here on WebWorkerDaily before, experts like Seth Godin and veteran remote managers like Orange Business Services’ Mark Fitzpatrick both recommend simply allowing participants to use text chat as a second communication channel running under the main speaker during conference calls and remote meetings.

“When you put text chat in parallel with a voice conference call, magical things happen,” Godin says, suggesting this controlled distraction increases participation, enables real-time commenting and tracks the flow of later ideas for later examination.

When it comes to distractions during remote meetings are you a hawk or a dove? Should managers give tech-enabled (perhaps tech-engendered) distractible minds a channel to productively wander or crack down on the equivalent of high-tech doodling?

Image courtesy of Flick user DoNotLick.

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The new feature is built into the latest version of the GoToMeeting software, and doesn’t require any fancy equipment — any webcam and microphone will do, although headsets will most likely be needed to keep room noise down, or users can choose to dial into an audio bridge. Each stream can be displayed at a resolution of 640 x 480 pixels, for a total maximum resolution of 1920 x 960 pixels.

I attended a demo with four attendees, and found it to be easy to use, and the quality to be very good. If you’ve used GoToMeeting before, you know that the software (available for Windows or Mac) is  quick to download, and doesn’t generally require any fiddling with settings. Audio was perfect, and video quality was quite acceptable for standard “talking head” meetings. The folks at GoToMeeting told me that they decided to limit the service to six simultaneous users in order to maintain video quality — plus, with more users, the video thumbnails for each person would be pretty hard to see.

The program automatically displays a split screen divided into the appropriate number of boxes need to show each participant, and a screen sharing space when desired. GoToMeeting has added some useful touches, like a subtle white outline that shows who’s talking at any given moment, and the ability to resize the viewable area to maximize the shared desktop if desired.

The new service occupies a niche between Skype and some of the higher-end video conferencing options that require sophisticated hardware. For organizations and individuals that won’t use the service often enough to justify GoToMeeting’s cost, similar technology will be available later in the year through Skype, since Citrix will be powering Skype’s upcoming web conferencing service.

HDFaces is available to existing GoToMeeting customers and trial users at no additional cost over the service’s standard pricing, which begins at $49/month or $468/year. A 30-day free online trial is available at the service’s website.

Do you use GoToMeeting? Will the addition of video capabilities make the service more attractive?

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Firstly, Logitech has announced that it has acquired Mirial, an Italian company that provides personal and mobile video conferencing solutions. The acquisition means that Logitech’s LifeSize division will be able to broaden its portfolio and offer a fully interoperable, enterprise video conferencing software solutions for distributed desktop and mobile users, offering compatibility with PC, Mac, iOS and Android devices. Mirial’s products will be added to LifeSize’s product range and will not be re-branded. Financial details of the acquisition haven’t been disclosed.

The company has also announced a new cloud-based business-class HD video collaboration platform called LifeSize Connections. It’s scalable, can be used instead of expensive on-premise infrastructure, and offers up to 9-way video bridging at 720p30 with fully encrypted media (this compares with up to 1080p30, 48-way calling for LifeSize’s on-premise solution, although there are apparently plans to increase Connections’ capacity over time). It’s fairly inexpensive, costing $30 per user per month for desktop licenses, or $100 per seat per month for endpoints. LifeSize will be rolling out a private beta of the service in the next few weeks. It’s expected to become globally available in the third quarter of this year.

Finally, LifeSize is also announcing a new entry-level 720p endpoint, LifeSize Passport Connect. It’s optimized for cloud-based platforms, such as LifeSize Connections, offers a simplified user experience and integrates Logitech camera technology. It costs under $1,500 ($999 when bundled with LifeSize Connections).

With these announcements, LifeSize is taking aim at its enterprise competitors such as Cisco and Polycom. By lowering the total cost of ownership of video collaboration and making its solutions much easier to deploy, it’s hoping that these new products will boost its sales with organizations that might previously have been reluctant to fully embrace video, and also enable existing customers to consider using video with remote offices and telecommuting employees. LifeSize Connections should be attractive to companies with a high degree of client interaction as it enables “guest invitation” capabilities, which will allow them to use their video solution to communicate with their clients. However, when compared with the cheap or free consumer video conferencing solutions available from the likes of Skype and Google, LifeSize’s offerings still seem pretty expensive. As Ryan noted in his post about the launch of 8×8′s Virtual Room video conferencing system Tuesday, companies will need to consider whether the higher-quality video and encryption provided by “business class” solutions from the likes of LifeSize are worth paying for, when cheap consumer solutions are often even easier to deploy and use, and are frequently “good enough” for most purposes.

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Mark Fitzpatrick, the head of workplace development at Orange Business Services, knows this well. He has put together a team of internal candidates from the best and brightest Orange has to offer. The result is a team spread from Dallas to Delhi, some working in Orange offices and some entirely from home. How does he manage to coordinate a group of talent spread across nearly every time zone? WebWorkerDaily spoke with him to find out.

Talent

The flexibility provided by remote work tools allows Fitzpatrick to source the best niche talent. The  result is a globally dispersed team with a powerful set of skills. “There was no design to create a remote team,” he explains. “We were looking for some pretty unique combinations of skill sets; for example, a person with a great deal of real estate and telecom experience. If that particular rare animal shows up in a city that you really didn’t have in mind, then you’re choosing the person, not necessarily the location.”

The global reach of his team’s work also means that even if he had hired his next-door neighbor, that co-located worker would soon be handling projects around the world. “The guy in Dallas, for example, has been the primary project manager for our major service center in Cairo,” Fitzpatrick says. “We’re only going to run one of these projects in Cairo about once every two or three years, so we’re certainly not going to try and source someone in the Middle East when that person would end up having to manage another project in Petrópolis, Brazil. “

Being blind to distance has helped Fitzpatrick build an exceptional team, but the variety of time zones is also a hurdle. Old-fashioned flexibility is key. “Someone has to suffer and do a two a.m. conference call,” he says. Also, the team has learned to be mindful about decision making. Fitzpatrick is based in Europe but has an employee in Sydney. “We couldn’t be much farther away,” he explains. “If he has to get my approval, then it can add a day, and if I have a question for him, that costs us a day. So we don’t ask each other ping-pong questions that take a whole week that, if we were in the same time zone, would have taken minutes. You have to plan when and where the decision is going to be made, who has to be involved, and minimize that.”

Tools

Different situations call for different tools, according to Fitzpatrick. If “it’s a non-real-time decision you want documented, then email it is.” But his team is also finding some “interesting combos,” including audio conferencing plus instant messaging, very useful.

“The thing about audio conferencing is, you can set a date and then everybody has agreed to a decision time frame. But once you get these players involved, they use instant messaging during the audio call,“ he says. “You can have the conversation outside of the conversation. Everybody is listening to what the speaker is saying, but underneath they’re writing each other instant messages and building agreements. They’re rapidly forming little subcommittees and building up to the decision, so the decisions happen faster. That combination is becoming vital to the way we make decisions.”

This sort of thing, Fitzpatrick adds, works less well with video conferencing. “What we found is a 10-minute subject on audio conference should be moved to more like 20 minutes on telepresence. The additional time was created by the fact that everybody’s fully engaged, so you are going to get more input. But also, the informal agreements haven’t really happened, so people are trying to determine in that slow way that we do in face-to-face communication.”

Tips

Having managed co-located teams previously, Fitzpatrick has noticed one big difference with his current distributed team. “When there’s the ability to bring multiple people into the same room, it’s not so much your relationship with the employees, it’s their relationships with each other. Whereas when everything goes remote, there is more of a hub-and-spoke kind of relationship. I sometimes feel like everyone has a relationship with me that is stronger than their relationships with each other.”

To encourage interrelationships among team members, Fitzpatrick has learned to “delegate and walk away. They tend to develop their own relationships that way.” He’s also learned that building team cohesion takes a conscious effort from him in the form of a simple behavior change. “I became much more mindful of my instant message status,” he says. “At the coffee cooler, you see the person. You know that they’re not occupied, but when you’ve got a telephone, there’s no way to know, so use instant message to say, ‘Yeah, I’m available.’ It’s really important to turn your status to green even though you’re super busy.”

Fitzpatrick also notes sociological research showing that “the old expression ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’ is actually completely wrong.” Reduce your contact with someone to less than ten times per year and science says it will changes your relationship. “I believe it’s called Dunbar’s number,” he says. “We can all keep about 150 relationships close, but once you get beyond 150, relationships start to fall apart. So if you’re going to be one of the 150 with your team, frequency matters.” A recurring meeting in Outlook makes sure he has regular one-on-one meetings with all his employees where they can discuss any issue on their mind.

Image courtesy Flickr user VanDammeMaarten.be

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Video conferencing and online meeting provider FuzeBox announced a new product Wednesday, Fuze Telepresence Connect, which hopes to overcome these interoperability problems by enabling its Fuze Meeting product to act as a gateway between Tandberg, Polycom and LifeSize telepresence systems. It can also extend telepresence across iPads, Android tablets, PCs and Macs, making it available to an entire workforce.

Telepresence Connect offers:

• Scalable multiparty HD video conferencing. High resolution and high frame rate encode and decode at multiple frame rates and resolutions.
• Standards-based encoding technology. H.264/AVC/SVC based.
• Error resilience and localization. Maintains continuous high-quality video without broken pictures or other artifacts in environments with high packet loss, while individual client network errors do not affect other conference participants
• Resolution and rate matching. Supports sending video to multiple endpoints with different bandwidths and resolution capabilities, without transcoding.
• Dynamic rate control. Automatically and continuously senses the current network condition and adjusts bit rates accordingly
• Firewall/NAT traversal. Embedded functionality that provides a safe and secure connection through any firewall with no feature loss and no additional equipment required.

I’ve seen a demo of Telepresence Connect in Fuze Meeting, and it was impressive, enabling connection to and switching between several telepresence rooms, as well as simultaneous desktop HD video conferencing with several participants. It also provides access to Fuze Meeting’s built-in collaboration tools, such as file viewing, annotation and screen sharing. The seamless connection to various telepresence rooms was particularly pleasing, as typically setting up a telepresence meeting session is not straightforward. I also liked the intuitive Fuze Meeting interface, which enables users to determine the layout of the conferencing screen, choosing which video feeds to highlight or bring to the front — something that’s not usually possible in MCU-based telepresence conferences.

FuzeBox’s new product is not the only cloud-based gateway that can connect telepresence systems. Vidtel, used by the MondoPad device I wrote about last week, also claims to offer “any-to-any” HD video conferencing, for example. However, Fuze Meeting with Telepresence Connect is the only product that works across H.323, SIP and H.264 and can also connect to tablet devices as well as PCs and Macs, and is also the only product to have built-in, easy-to-use conferencing and collaboration tools. Installation of Fuze Telepresence Connect starts at $18,000, with 20 percent annual maintenance fees. That may sound expensive, but it is pretty small compared to the investment required for a typical telepresence setup.

A potential issue for FuzeBox’s new product is the effort vendors are now making to improve interoperability themselves, with most new gear now adhering to either the TIP or H.323 standards, while Cisco, for example, announced an update to its TC and  CTS software Tuesday that will be available later this year and extends interoperability with all standards-based endpoints. So has FuzeBox’s product come too late to market? I don’t think so; the telepresence vendors have been sluggish in their attempts to improve interoperability and there are plenty of existing, legacy telepresence installations out there that companies would like to squeeze more usage and life out of.

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The MondoPad is based on Windows 7 Pro, and comes with several touch apps built-in, including a whiteboard, video conferencing tools and a document viewer. Additional Windows apps can be added to the device by administrators. Video conferencing is powered by Vidtel, a cloud video conferencing service provider; the Mondopad has a built-in front-facing camera and sound-bar and can handle simultaneous 720p video calls with up to 12 people. MondoPad users don’t need to invest in any additional videoconferencing hardware, as the Vidtel service can connect to SIP and H.323 standards-based endpoints and a variety of proprietary videoconferencing platforms, including consumer apps like Google Chat and enterprise telepresence systems from Polycom and Cisco.

Collaboration apps provided by the MondoPad include document annotation tools and a whiteboard for brainstorming; multiple Mondopads on the same network support collaborative multi-party whiteboard sessions. The document viewer offers support for many popular file formats, including PowerPoint, Word, Excel, JPG and Adobe PDF. Picture-in-picture functionality means that more than one app can be displayed on the screen simultaneously so that, for example, the whiteboard and videoconferencing apps can be used at the same time. Remote meeting participants aren’t left out, either: they are able to see what’s on the display via a web page served by the MondoPad, with access for mobile devices catered for by a mobile-optimized web page.

The MondoPad has a recommended price of $5,949, with video conferencing available for a monthly subscription cost that will vary depending on requirements, but is likely to be around $60 per participant, according to InFocus’s Director of Marketing Scott Niesen. The device is scheduled to become available in July.

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In recent months, I’ve increased my usage of video and multi-media presentations and conferencing, both for collaboration with external business contacts and for internal product development.

Not long after starting to use these technologies on a regular basis, I decided I needed a better and more-permanent setup in order to remain productive and comfortable, while also being able to shift quickly and seamlessly from one activity to another. Otherwise, I was constantly rearranging my work space to fit the task at hand and spending as much time setting up for a given activity as I was actually completing it.

The Case for a Dedicated Media Room

Many companies today with distributed workforces are making dedicated “media rooms” an important aspect of communication, one that allows workers separated geographically to engage in dynamic conversations, as if they were in the same room and without having to spend time setting up equipment.

Lew Epstein is a general manager at Steelcase, one company providing such working environments. Steelcase’s “media:scape rooms” are dedicated meeting areas that use furniture and technology to create collaborative work spaces for distributed teams. Epstein says that “teams need to share complex ideas [and] solutions that enable them to connect quickly and globally. They want to share content on their laptop or get up and write or draw on a whiteboard, and they need all the subtleties of face-to-face communication, too. For true collaboration, groups need spaces that nurture the process of collaboration. Work is not defined by what you do at a desk, and organizations are no longer confined within office towers. Teams need comfortable, versatile collaborative spaces to work in.”

Tandberg, now part of Cisco, is another company that provides such solutions for face-to-face communication or, as the company refers to them, “telepresence environments.” While these spaces require considerable investment, they can provide companies with cost savings and create greener organizations by cutting travel.

Creating a Media Room

The options for setting up a media space are as varied as the companies that use them. Overall, you’ll want to make sure your solution provides a seamless way to share information, audio, and video so that your team can easily connect and engage with one another remotely, but here are a few other considerations to make when planning your media room or space:

• Think about how your team currently collaborates and how you might improve remote meetings and presentations.
• Decide if you need a dedicated room is required,  or if whether you can integrate your media space within your current office or meeting area.
• Decide if you’ll be conducting calls with multiple parties at either end or with just one person.
• Think about whether your solution needs to be portable or if it will be set up as a permanent point within your office (some HD telepresence units are now reasonably portable).
• Consider the types of content you will share within your presentations and meetings.

In the end, a dedicated media space allows a distributed workforce to collaborate and share information from anywhere in the world quickly and easily, saving time and money, while increasing the effectiveness of global communication.

Image courtesy Steelcase

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But does video really perform as well as face-to-face interaction? How does it compare to audio-only communication? Does it always outperform text-only channels like instant messaging and email? Let’s look at different types of tasks and see how video affects the work and communication quality experienced by remote teams.

Technical Tasks

In a study from Carnegie Mellon University, instructors coached inexperienced participants to repair a bicycle. Each pair communicated in one of the following ways: side-by-side, with an audio link, or with an audio-video link. The groups who worked side-by-side accomplished the task around 25 percent faster than the audio-only and audio-video groups. The latter two groups had no significant difference in time taken to complete the task or work quality.

How come video made no difference to the effectiveness of communication? In the experiment, the setup also made it hard for instructors to see referenced equipment; the worker had to maneuver the camera in its direction. This suggests for technical tasks, audio-only and audio-video connections might not result in a significant difference in work quality unless a sufficient quantity of visual information is shared. We should include views of the workspace, necessary equipment, and even the facial and gestural expressions of the participants. Plus, everyone must understand what visual information is being shared, to avoid repeatedly and unnecessarily asking other participants what it is they can see.

Negotiation

Research shows when it comes to negotiation, the richer the medium, the more collaborative negotiation becomes. Competitive bargaining is reduced, and negotiators exert more effort seeking common ground. This also reduces bargaining time and allows participants to become more open to future negotiations. So when you need to conduct remote negotiation and want it to be as collaborative is possible, always go for the richer medium. This means favoring videoconferencing over audio-only communications.

There is also more subtle kind of negotiation: the negotiation of meaning. In one experiment, researchers studied how pairs of native English speakers and non-native English speakers explained map routes to each other. Some teams performed the task with audio only, while others could see their partner on a screen.

Did video improve the negotiations? Not necessarily. Pairs that consisted only of native English speakers did not benefit from video. On the other hand, pairs with a non-native speaker had a much better performance with video.

According to the analysis, non-native English speakers with video had a higher rate of instructions and checked their understanding more. This might be because instructors could see visual cues as to whether their instructions were being understood or not. Without these cues, an audio-only team might go ahead to the next step without realizing that the instructions were misunderstood.

Team Cohesiveness

When it comes to team building, remote teams face several challenges. According to several studies, the perceived distance between members may lead to decreased cooperation and increased deception within the team. The good news is that there is evidence that increased and improved interaction may lessen the perceived distance over time. Can adding video help?

In one study, the researchers pointed out the cohesiveness of a group can depend on the following factors:

• Interpersonal attraction: the feeling of affection among members of a team.
• Group pride: the feeling of prestige, satisfaction and loyalty towards the other team members.
• Task commitment: the sense of attraction towards the tasks of the team.

Their findings showed when it comes to achieving these three factors, videoconferencing was the most effective means of remote communication. For interpersonal attraction and task commitment, the second most effective medium was email. Audio conferencing was the least effective medium. As for group pride, videoconferencing was followed by audio conferencing, with email and instant messaging performing considerably less well.

While the various methods of communication provided no significant differences in performance, videoconferencing seemed to have the best effect on their cohesiveness. Another study from the University of Amsterdam may hold the explanation as to why this might be, indicating videoconferencing lowers the perceived distance between members of a group by creating the impression of shared space, even when workers are remotely located.

Socialization

Interactions in the workplace aren’t limited to business. There’s water cooler talk where colleagues discuss their families, hobbies, and other personal topics. These spontaneous interactions happen less frequently (or not at all) for remote teams because we don’t have a shared office. We may be tempted to dismiss spontaneous social interactions like these as trivial, or at least less important than our work, but research from the University of Michigan shows informal conversations before collaboration were an important aspect of establishing trust for remote teams. If video is added, will it make a difference?

A 2007 study from the University of Calgary showed remote teams socialized at the beginning of a videoconferencing session, mimicking face-to-face encounters. This was true even for teams where the members were already acquainted and had some tasks to finish. According to the researchers, these teams were probably encouraged by the “shared space” they had, since the central team had a dedicated facility with multiple projectors and screens.

But this kind of dedicated space for videoconferencing isn’t always possible. Elaborate telepresence setups may be costly and can take up too much room. Though the use of “virtual space” is a good alternative — such as a separate monitor or a section on your screen — many workers may not have enough screen real estate to accommodate both social videoconferences and working applications. This may mean that for now, videoconferencing isn’t the best medium for spontaneous social exchange.

In the book Distributed Work from The MIT Press, authors Bonnie Nardi and Steve Whittaker suggested chat contributed to a remote team’s sense of social connection. It also provided a venue for real-time impromptu conversations between members of a team. Perhaps chatting or instant messaging — without video — is a less intrusive, more cost-effective way of being open to social exchanges.

When it comes to technical tasks, negotiation, team building and socialization, simply adding video to communications doesn’t automatically add value. We need to make informed decisions about how and why we want to use it. Only then will our video equipment, software and efforts be worth it.

Do you use video in remote communication? When was it essential and when was it unnecessary?

Photo courtesy stock.xchng user speedy2

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A few short months ago, I was the only virtual attendee of our Monday morning meetings, and a webcam-enabled laptop in the room with my colleagues was sufficient to get me in attendance. We used Skype for simple point-to-point video calling and it really worked quite well.

But now that there are three remote team members, we find that Skype by itself, is no longer sufficient. Even though Skype has added multi-camera support, it’s not available on the Mac, which makes using it a challenge as we use both Mac and PC. We really like the Skype platform, though, and use it for our IM and individual chat needs, so when looking for a way to overcome our technical challenges we looked for ways to “piggyback” on our existing system, rather than move to an entirely new solution. After a couple of weeks of testing I believe we have found our solution with VuRoom, a video conferencing plugin for Skype.

From a participant standpoint, using VuRoom couldn’t be easier. I join a call in Skype as I normally would, then click a special link that the host provides. A web-based viewer launches showing me the video feeds of all participants. For the host it’s a bit more involved to initiate a call but the process is straightforward. Only the host needs to install the Skype plugin, so it’s possible to get new folks involved and attending with little fuss. Upon connecting with your participants, the VuRoom plugin starts automatically and steps you through the creation of your meeting. The current VuRoom product supports up to eight video collaborators. Video and sound quality is good and in my use so far I’ve not had any issues with dropouts or lost calls.

In addition to the conferencing functionality, VuRoom also offers desktop sharing and other collaboration functionality, including slide sharing. This lets the host do presentations and share documents with the participants. In our meetings we frequently see demonstrations of new products and so far this functionality has worked really well. The document or screen share pops up in an extra window the web view so I can still continue to see the others participants on the call in addition to the host presentation.

In looking for a solution, one of our challenges was finding something that was not only useful, but affordable. While most competing services seem to have per-seat licenses, VuRoom offers a fixed $10 per month fee for unlimited usage for up to the eight participants per meeting so it’s very cost-effective. VuRoom works with both PC and Mac versions of Skype and all modern browsers. A free 15-day trial is available for testing before purchase. Overall, we’ve been very pleased with VuRoom.

How do you keep your team connected?

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