A funny thing happened on the way to the videoconference room: A lot of people realized that they didn’t need to see the other person. “In general, when two people are talking about something that they’re doing, from the standpoint of productivity, the most important thing is for them to see what it is that they’re talking about, rather than each other,” says Lou Latham, a research analyst with the Gartner Group, based in Stamford, Connecticut. “In a sales situation, personal contact is more important, but in a collaborative atmosphere, data and document sharing is the key component.” Latham says he frequently receives calls from companies who want to start videoconferencing because they have employees in different offices that need to work together. “We talk for a while, and it turns out that what they really want is NetMeeting.”

When face-to-face videoconferencing shifts to data sharing, videoconferences become less formal and more of a workgroup activity. “Today, when you have a videoconference, you go to a special room, and it’s all preplanned,” says Latham. “You have to e-mail or fax things that you’re going to talk about. It’s an occasion. The goal should be to make it a commodity, and the best way to make it a commodity is to focus on the work that you’re doing rather than the novelty value of being able to see the other person.” Two architects might view a drawing of a building and work collaboratively on the document—without seeing each other’s face. Or several engineers could cooperate on a new car design and be able to concentrate solely on the project itself.

While some videoconferencing systems, such as PictureTel’s 970, are designed to accommodate both video and data, there are some tradeoffs between the two types of content. “A video stream is optimized for frame rates, so it’s smooth,” says Latham. “It might be running at 640 x 480. With a document data stream, it’s much more important to have a higher resolution. You’re willing to give up the frame rate for a 1,024 x 768 resolution, which is the resolution you would expect on your desktop.” He predicts that the trend toward data content will help push the sales of equipment. “If you have an NTSC display, you’ll be looking to upgrade, because you won’t be able to work collaboratively on a diagram with 10-point type in the same way you can locally.”

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