One of the keys to successful development of future real-time collaboration tools is the ability of industry developers to understand the key importance played by their facilities to ease the contacting and invitation of other parties into a collaboration event.
While we have been getting into the habit of thinking that Web conferencing equals something similar to a WebEx conference, reality couldn't be further from truth.
WebEx is an outstandingly successful example of a conferencing tool meant to be used for official corporate presentations. Though it can be used for small meetings its cost and facilities are best exploited in large conferences and presentations.
In these types of event, invitation by formal email, with long advance notification times, is pretty much the norm and is well accepted by all.
But switch now to online collaboration of the more informal kind. The type of online collaboration that you would carry out with your own team, with distant working partners, or with the students you are supporting.
Inviting them through a formal, asynchronous and procedural approach like email invitation most of the time doesn't cut it. It takes away all of the immediacy, need for immediate reaction, ability to get a nod without mobilizing the entire day agenda.
Sometimes collaborating online means getting together only for a few minutes to share a document and approve a set of paragraphs or to discuss a final price to communicate to a customer. In these situations, inviting partners, clients and teammates needs to be a much more intimate, direct and fast-response process, allowing you to easily assess availability of partners and willingness to cooperate within seconds, minutes or hours.
It should be a system that also allows, when possible, to set-up a delayed, as-soon-as-possible (as soon as everyone is there) online meeting type.
Instant messaging and presence awareness tools seem to provide the very best core facilities to offer this type of direct initial contact required to simplify and adapt meeting requirements to situations requiring rapid response times.
It is therefore evident that the ability to be successful in this area depends on developers ability to integrate multiple and scalable notification options that can be adopted for different situations.
Instant messaging for rapid response, informal, immediate metting needs.
Instant messaging integrated with an integrated coordination mechanism for ASAP meetings where a number of people need to be available for the meeting to actually called in.
Email for formal meetings, conferences, seminars and other official events.
Instant messaging integration is therefore critical to effective convocation management and the ability to support multiple IM protocols without forcing the end user into using another proprietary system are very evident.
Here is one more reason where appreciation for use of open interoperability standards in instant messaging systems makes a lot of sense and the proliferation of further proprietary solution creates only more difficulty for true open interaction.
Convocation management is therefore the area of interest concerned with facilitating online notification, invitation, registration and acceptance to online real-time collaboration events.
Look out for new breakthrough Web conferencing technologies, such as ASAP by Convoq, which fully embrace these critical concepts while pushing them to the cutting edge of what can be achieved today with video, audio, and other typical conferencing facilities.
ASAP (As Soon As Present) sports some great collaboration and presence management features on a new powerful, cutting-edge multi-platform solution.
A fundamental notion in ASAP is presence (e.g. As Soon As Present), where it goes way beyond the extremely limited notions of presence in existing IM systems.
For example, in ASAP you can have delegates or Stand-Ins --- if you aren't immediately available, enable other users to select a stand-in to try and communicate with (e.g. co-worker, boss, husband).
A more powerful concept is that of Lifelines -- these are topic-based presence switches that enable users to find someone to communicate with others based on a topic or role (e.g. IT HelpDesk, Legal Services, Product Support).
Both of these are good examples of social networking features in the real-time realm.
Inspired by Jeremy Allaire
VoIP is a feature and by
Convoq ASAP Public Beta
