Five virtual alternatives to meetings

Need to bring together workers spread across the globe - or an organisation? Andy McCue rounds up your best virtual options.

Last month we looked at five ways to make meetings more productive and bearable.

But how do you encourage collaboration and communication across remote workers and global teams?

Faster and cheaper broadband connectivity along with new web 2.0 tools and technologies mean virtual collaboration has, thankfully, moved on beyond tedious and awkward conference calls.

Here silicon.com looks at five innovative virtual alternatives to meetings - with real-world examples of how they're being used.

Virtual Friday beers over IM
Instant messaging (IM) is used within many companies as a quick and informal way for colleagues, both in the office and remotely based, to communicate easily.

Yuuguu is one of many web-based collaboration tools that enable staff to 'screen share' and work together online, as well as hold conference calls and send IMs.

Yuuguu is a small company with its developers based remotely around the country and the team uses its own IM technology to catch up over 'virtual beers' on Friday afternoons.

Chris Sewart, technical director at Yuuguu, says the beer isn't mandatory but the virtual sessions do help get the remote team together.

"You miss out on the stuff that goes on in the office. On Friday afternoon someone sends around an IM asking if anyone fancies a beer. People come and go for about an hour. Usual rules apply - no shop talk. It's about trying to get a group of people to work better together," he said.

Purple dragons in Second Life
Virtual worlds such as Second Life are an alternative place for teams to meet up and collaborate online.

Unilever has its own private office on a sunny island in Second Life, which it uses to educate staff about the importance of data security - with staff avatars hijacked by purple dragons to highlight security weaknesses.

The company says this approach works better for the under-35 'digital native' staff who can relate to it better than a stuffy corporate video. Andrew Strong, Unilever's global director of security, hailed the Second Life trial as a success, with almost all of 2,500 employees completing an online data security survey after watching the video in the virtual world.

Hotel chain Crowne Plaza has also ventured into virtual worlds, setting up meeting rooms for businesses in Second Life.

On Crowne Plaza's 'The Place to Meet Island', companies can reserve private meeting rooms equipped with streaming audio, video, presentation and image viewing capabilities. The Crowne island also offers a 20-seat lounge room with bar area for informal gatherings, and a theatre room for large conferences. The facilities are free of charge and can be reserved for up to eight hours.

And it's not just about Second Life. Other virtual worlds, such as Qwaq host virtual rooms for team members to share documents and hold discussions.

'Help me Obi-Wan' - 3D holograms
Videoconferencing has been with us, in various forms, for many years but the Star Wars-like holographic capabilities of the technology are now being touted by mainstream vendors such as Cisco.

At the opening of Cisco's new globalisation centre in Bangalore, India, CEO John Chambers was joined on stage by what appeared to be life-sized 3D holographic versions of two of his fellow executives from thousands of miles away in California - thanks to Cisco's TelePresence videoconferencing technology.

In fact, it was something of an illusion using an age-old mirrors and projection technique called 'Pepper's Ghost'.

For this '3D hologram' demonstration Cisco used technology from UK company Musion, which uses a single camera lens for filming and then projects 3D images as 2D images into a 3D stage set - the mind of the audience then creates the full 3D illusion.

Cisco is still developing its 3D videoconferencing technology but it reckons it will be commercially available in the next three to five years.

Check out the full 3D holographic demo by Chambers on YouTube here.

Wild wild wikis
Wikis are widely used across many organisations for collaboration.

One example at BT is the 'Agile Cookbook'. It was started four years ago as an open source wiki based on the TiddlyWiki technology BT subsequently acquired. Used by thousands of people, it's an attempt to pull together BT's knowledge about agile development and how to apply it within the company.

Jeremy Ruston, creator of TiddlyWiki and now head of open source innovation at BT Design, said: "Wikis are an inclusive way of lowering the barrier to collaboration. The challenge always is making wikis more inclusive and getting more people to contribute."

Such has been the internal success of the Agile Cookbook wiki that BT is now going to make it available publicly.

Another organisation that has set up its own internal wiki is Accenture. Its internal wiki website - called Accenturepedia - allows employees to create and consume reference information useful to each other, such as the definitions and difference between commonly used Accenture terminology.

Social networking - beyond drunken photos
Social networking isn't just about poking friends, tossing sheep and posting drunken photos on Facebook - it can also be a serious business tool.

A European survey of more than 2,500 people sponsored by AT&T found two-thirds of employees using social networking in the workplace say it has made them more efficient and almost half say it has sparked ideas and creativity.

The study shows 15 per cent of organisations are using existing online social networks, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, while 39 per cent use their own internal collaboration sites on intranets.

There are, of course, downsides to encouraging staff to use external social networks. Almost half of survey respondents say social networks are both a distraction to employees and a source of company leaks of confidential information.

The alternative is to keep employee social networking safely behind the firewall, leaving staff to throw sheep on Facebook in their own time.

Accenture is one company which has set up its own internal 'collaboration 2.0' tools for employees. The project, led by Accenture CIO Frank Modruson, features a Facebook-like internal knowledge management system that allows staff to host their profiles and photos along with details about their areas of expertise.