The 26th IPP Symposium

Web Collaboration

Ted Tracy, Vice President, Product Development, Latitude Communications

The enterprise workplace has become dramatically focused on increasing professional worker productivity-outsourcing of IT operations, reduced travel budgets and increased usage of teleconferencing tools are all examples. In addition, the onset of the Internet has provided several web-based tools to accommodate the need for improved efficiencies in corporate collaboration. This trend has spawned a new technology category of "web-conferencing" to represent technologies, tools and applications that will improve group collaboration across web networks. Web-conferencing allows multiple remote participants to exchange voice, data and video information across IP networks for general-purpose team collaboration as well as specific vertical applications. As the Internet continues to improve in terms of both total bandwidth as well as "quality of service" mechanisms, web-conferencing will become even more pervasive. As a specific case in point, Latitude Communications' flagship product MeetingPlace has been recognized as the best-of-breed technology that addresses the problem of web-conferencing and provides a powerful solution to the need for improved professional worker productivity and associated collaboration.