Rui CarmoThe art of holding Meetings by using technology to place several miles between yourself and the other parties and yet being able keep them under your watchful eye.
Most modern video conferencing systems have H.323/H.324 support over TCP/IP, which means they have progressed a tiny step beyond using H.320 data atop an ISDN line.
If you know what you're doing (and have the infrastructure for it), placing calls to and from 3G/UMTS mobiles using H.324M is trivial and saves a lot of people a lot of time.
Just make sure you understand one thing that seems to be ignored by everyone trying to do it -
Without good audio (and that means decent microphones and echo cancellers), videoconferencing is utter crap. Video is nice, but decent audio is what makes conferencing usable. On the entry-level tiers, if you're not spending more money on audio than on cameras and screens, you're doing it wrong.
For some reason iChat is not standards-compliant in any way that matters for this, so using a Mac for "real" video conferencing entails installing XMeeting or ohphoneX.
Resources:
- Tandberg - good, classy, reliable - pick all three. Best audio ever, albeit at a price.
- XMeeting.
- H.323 resources.
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