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Figure 2-9 Q2-5 How Can You Use Collaboration Tools to Improve Team Communication? 85
Skype for Business Whiteboard
Showing Simultaneous
Contributions
Source: Used by permission from
Skype Corporation.

3
meetings can benefit from shared, online workspaces, such as that shown in Figure 2-9. With
such a whiteboard, team members can type, write, and draw simultaneously, which enables more
ideas to be proposed in a given period of time than when team members must wait in sequence to
express ideas verbally. If you have access to such a whiteboard, try it in your face-to-face meetings
to see if it works for your team.
However, given today’s communication technology, most students should forgo face-to-face
meetings. They are too difficult to arrange and seldom worth the trouble. Instead, learn to use
virtual meetings in which participants do not meet in the same place and possibly not at the
same time.
If your virtual meeting is synchronous (all meet at the same time), you can use conference
calls, multiparty text chat, screen sharing, webinars, or videoconferencing. Some students find
it weird to use text chat for school projects, but why not? You can attend meetings wherever you
are, without using your voice. Google Hangouts support multiparty text chat, as does Skype for
Business. Google or Bing “multiparty text chat” to find other, similar products.
Screen-sharing applications enable users to view the same whiteboard, application, or
other display. Figure 2-9 shows an example whiteboard for a Falcon Security meeting. This white-
board, which is part of Skype for Business, allows multiple people to contribute simultaneously. To
organize the simultaneous conversation, the whiteboard real estate is divided among the members
of the group, as shown. Some groups save their whiteboards as minutes of the meeting.
A webinar is a virtual meeting in which attendees view one of the attendees’ computer screens
for a more formal and organized presentation. WebEx (www.webex.com) is a popular commercial
webinar application used in virtual sales presentations.
If everyone on your team has a camera on his or her computer, you can also do videoconfer-
encing, like that shown in Figure 2-10. You can use Google Hangouts, WebEx, or Skype for Business,
which we will discuss in Q8. Videoconferencing is more intrusive than text chat (you have to comb
your hair), but it does have a more personal touch.
In some classes and situations, synchronous meetings, even virtual ones, are impossible
to arrange. You just cannot get everyone together at the same time. In this circumstance, when