Video Conferencing on the Cheap

Skype has been around for a long time now and I find that it still is an essential tool in my arsenal daily used applications. It works into our environment at the office even more because our main service ticketing system utilizes will make use of it to dial out from the customer contact pages. It gained even more of my appreciation this past Friday when I spent most of the afternoon in video conference with our public relations person. We have been working on prepping for this weeks video projects about CES and were able to work online, with full video and sound and sharing files back and forth between our computer systems while in our separate offices. Not that this is something recently available, it was just that it was geeky neat! We were able to easily bring different people into our office and review captured video and each of were able to process the work that we each needed to complete and share with each other.

Items needed: Skype Account, Computer, Web Camera, an Internet connection and someone with the same basic setup. If you are connecting computer to computer your Skype account is free. If you want some of the other basic features that are available from Skype like calling to a non-Skype user or a land line, or having a Skype Phone Number then these services make Skype that much more useable.