Screen Sharing better than Video Conference

Screen sharing applications such as Glance.net or WebEx.com usually provide much more value to collaborative online meetings than Video Conferencing.

The topic came up today while discussing Enterprise 2.0 techologies with a local engineering firm. They were preparing to demo WebEx and wanted my feedback with rspect to video conferencing. My experience over the past four years of collaboraing online with partners all over the globe is that video conferencing rarely provides measurable value. This is in contrast to screen sharing which can be invaluable to a working online meeting.

The reason video conferencing doesn't provide much value is the information it provides. It lets you know where people are and how they look. The thing is, the people you're working with could be anywhere.. but who cares? They could be sitting on a beach, in an office, in a coffee shop, or at home and it has very little impact on the call providing the background noise is kept to a minimum and they can provide you with their undivided attention. The same is true for how they look. Whether in a business suit or sitting in their underwear, what matters is that you have their undivided attention so they can provide value to the conversation.

Sharing a screen on the other hand provides information that is often critical to the coversation. Having a shared screen means you can point to links, collaborate on working documents in real time, watch as someone takes notes and creates tasks based on the conversation, see code, brainstorm using tools such as MindMap, etc.

Video conferencing is a great tool for online family chats but within the enterprise sharing a screen has proven so beneficial I would think that for most business applications, video conferencing is simply a nice to have.