The future of Internet based conferencing : ubiquitous human group communication

In the modern world where many companies and groups are distributed there is a strong need for tools that support distributed work, yet very few companies actually use more than phones and email for their daily collaborative work. If they need to meet physically, they travel long distances wasting resources in the form of time, money on travel, pollution from their transports and mostly they are not available for interaction with their other colleagues. The latter creates stress for both the traveler and the persons in her/his organization that need to interact with the traveler to get their work done as smoothly as possible. At the same time the need for distributed work increases with the possibility for having work forces distributed over large geographical areas. Employees work more from their home and on the road today than they did just a decade ago and personal experience show that allowing employees to work in a more relaxed environment as their home minimizes stress symptoms, and increases life quality. One such support tool is e-meetings where users can interact in real-time using high-quality audio, video, text chat, shared whiteboard, shared applications and co-web browsing.Godkänd; 2005; 20060929 (ysko