 With the price of gas bouncing up and down (mostly up) like a hyperactive 6-year-old on a pogo stick, companies and business professionals are looking for ways to trim travel mileage. One option is to cut down on out-of-office meetings and presentations. Although there will never be a substitute for an in-person handshake, there is a way to reduce the number of meeting trips you take. It’s Citrix GoToMeeting (www.gotomeeting.com), and it’s so simple to use, even your most technologically challenged customer (or the aforementioned 6-year-old) can master it.
GoToMeeting is an online meeting and presentation solution that offers the trifecta of features beloved by corporations: It’s cheap, easy, and fast. It takes about two minutes to sign up for the service on the GoToMeeting Web site and install the applet on your PC. After you complete the installation, an orange, flower-shaped icon on the Windows Taskbar lets you open and run the GoToMeeting Control Panel. (You can also start and run meetings from the GoToMeeting Web site.) | 
Optional integration lets you organize and manage GoToMeeting events with Microsoft Outlook (seen here) or Lotus Notes. |
 Time To Meet
The Control Panel contains five panes: Screen Sharing, Attendee List, Chat, Invite Others, and Meeting Info. When you open GoToMeeting, a bright red note points you to Invite Others, which contains the information you distribute so others can join your meeting. Click the Email button and GoToMeeting will paste the specifics into a message for you; optionally you can call your attendees or disseminate the information another way.
To join, attendees visit the GoToMeeting site, enter the code you sent, and voilà! Whatever visuals you designate appear on their Desktops just as if they were sitting in front of your PC. After attendees arrive, oversized buttons on the GoToMeeting Control Panel make it easy to run the meeting. You can share or stop sharing your Desktop at will, enable attendees to make notations with included drawing tools, share keyboard and mouse control, and/or change the presenter so another person can share his Desktop.
You can also choose which Desktop elements to share: the entire display; the entire display with icons, background, and Taskbar hidden; or just the window of an open application. With more than one application open, you can toggle between programs.
An Imperfect World
GoToMeeting is purely document-based; it doesn’t support audio or video teleconferencing, which will be a serious drawback for some. To conduct an audio conference while you are meeting online, Citrix provides free (but not toll-free) audio conferencing services, issuing a phone number you and your attendees use to dial in. (If you are meeting with only one or two other people, it’s just as easy to dial them directly using three-way calling if needed.)
GoToMeeting has a few other drawbacks, as well. You can only participate in one meeting at a time, and you cannot have screens from more than one application on display concurrently. If you have clients using Mac-based systems, they’ll be out of luck because GoToMeeting only runs on Windows machines.
Good & Plenty
Nevertheless, GoToMeeting is a quick and easy way to give a sales pitch, run through a tutorial, or interactively share the contents of a file with someone in a remote location. Your connection will be secure, and GoToMeeting’s powerful compression technology will ensure almost no information delivery lag time, even with a dial-up connection.
Options available from drop-down menus on the Control Panel and your Taskbar icon give you even more control, letting you schedule meetings in advance (optionally integrated with Outlook or Lotus Notes calendars), enable or disable text-based chatting, and record your online sessions. (You’ll need a microphone or software to record audio.) At a price of $49 per month for up to 11 users (you plus 10 invitees), GoToMeeting is a powerfully attractive option for anyone who wants to spend more time in the office and less on the road. 
by Jennifer Farwell
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