Most businesses use online meetings to collaborate on projects and push ideas forward. All you need to host a business meeting is audio calling, but there are a host of tools that can boost the user experience and help improve your business’s productivity.
We’ve come up with five essential online meeting tools to help your team get the most out of their conferences.
- Video
- Screen Sharing
- Drawing Tools
- Remote Computer Sharing
- Call Recording and Playback
Five Essential Online Meeting Tools
1. Video
While audio is essentially all you need to host a meeting, video is a big complement. With video, users can have live conversations without leaving the comfort of their office. This makes it much easier for teams to get together to collaborate on topics and share ideas across states or countries.
What’s more, video allows users to share micro-expressions, the non-verbal cues that indicate changes in opinion or expression. When users can see each other in a face-to-face conversation, they build a stronger relationship with one another.
Video meetings can be used by everyone at the company: CEOs, CFOs, customer support, development, content—you name it, a department or specialist at your company will more than likely benefit from the use of video during business meetings.
To enable video, you’ll need a device with a camera or webcam and access to an internet connection.
2. Screen Sharing
Next to video in most-valuable-tools is screen sharing. Screen sharing allows users to broadcast their screen to other meeting participants. This tool is often used for training or presentation purposes, making it ideal for employees in leadership positions, management and technical support.
When you’re looking to share what you see on your screen with others in your meeting, screen sharing makes it easy to select exactly what you want to show and hide everything else. Screen share is an essential tool for sharing ideas and hosting meetings online.
3. Drawing Tools
Users can also benefit from drawing tools, also known as whiteboarding tools. Drawing tools can boost productivity by allowing users to directly highlight areas on the screen with different colors. Users can circle areas on the screen, make arrows or create images from their imagination on top of the shared screen.
What’s more, when using drawing tools on a blank background, users can create concepts from their imagination directly on their screen and share those ideas with meeting participants seamlessly. Users can have live feedback from their guests and find more intuitive ways of collaborating.
4. Remote Computer Sharing
While screen sharing allows users to broadcast their screen to meeting participants, remote computer sharing allows a user to give permissions to another user to take control of their computer. That second user can now access the first user’s computer completely, opening files or providing general troubleshooting support.
Remote computer sharing is widely used among technical support departments since it allows specialists to quickly dial in and provide support easily.
5. Call Recording and Playback
Through the course of your professional career, you’ll attend a lot of meetings. Some meetings may be more important than others.
With call recording and playback, users can save their most important meetings into an archive to bring back up for later playback. This allows new team members or members that may have missed the meeting the first time to go back and review the conference.
Since playback is available at any time, users have the option of downloading recordings and storing those files on their own database. What’s more, you can upload those files to a file-sharing platform like Dropbox and share your recordings with whomever you choose.
With these collaboration tools, your company is well on its way to sharing ideas and boosting productivity.
Productivity doesn’t have to be expensive. StartMeeting gives our users these tools and much more for 12.95/month per host! Sign up for your account now to start hosting online meetings today!
