How to Schedule Meetings Online Using GoToMeeting

GetConnected TV Techlook AJ Vickery: On today's how to segment I'm going to show you how you can conduct a meeting whether it's a business proposal or even collaborating with another business associate and I'm going to show you how you can do it without actually having to go to the meeting in person. We're going to save your time and travel and we're going to save you money and travel. We're going to do it using a program that came across called GoToMeeting, it's made by the folks at Citrix and I found it to be of really feature rich pack for being able to have meeting over the internet. There is a number of softwares out there that also do this, for example WebEx is one of them and they probably compete against each other. But I did happen like this GoToMeeting for a couple of reasons and one of them definitely was the cost. But enough about that, let's just show you how you can do it. So what I want to do today is actually show a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. Once you install GoToMeeting it puts this little tool bar in Microsoft Outlook and right up here you can see I can go to an instant meeting right now or I can schedule a meeting. When you schedule a meeting it simple says when are you can have this meeting. So you pick a date that works for you and your colleague and you pick a time and then you get to choose some information, are you can do it over the internet completely or do you want to use a phone is well? The cool about GoToMeeting is that it will actually allow you to send your, you know, business partner or your potential client a dial-in phone number and an access code and this is really professional if you are on business to be able to send that. So I'm going to say provide both and I'm going to hit schedule. What happens is it immediately create an Outlook meeting and this is perfect because now it's in Outlook, I'm going to get reminder in Outlook. When I synch it with my phone it's going to put a reminder in my phone so I don't forget about it and the body of the message it gives me the link that I go to and my meeting people go to. But it also gives me like I said that dial-in access number. So you simply dial that number, putting your access code and bang you now have a conference call going live while you're at your computer. Once they log in, you get this little thing on the screen here, they call at the control panel. Right up the top, once they've logged in you can see here I've got Christine Turner a colleague of mine who has also joined this meeting. I can decide what I'm going to show her and if I click the dropdown I can show her just the screen. So everything that's on my screen. I can also just choose the application. So if I didn't want here to see any of the instant messages, that popup or any of the types of things that I might get while we're in the meeting, like emails and what not, then I might just want her to see that one application. But I know Christine pretty well and it don't matter to me, so I'm showing the whole screen. Well I'm go into my PowerPoint presentation and this is where I found the software very powerful because not only -- I just have Christine in here right now I could add unlimited number of attendees, you can have 20 people, 30 people, 40 people or even two people, it doesn't really matter. But once I'm in my presentation. I have the ability to do a whole bunch of really cool things, because they are seeing everything that's on this screen. So for example I can click and I can choose from a number of different tools. I'm just going to grab a highlighter right now. And I can actually highlight sections of the presentation that I want to draw attention to, very powerful everyone is one the phone, we are all talking, but they are seeing everything that's on my screen. At any time I can actually give anyone of the people in this meeting control over my computer. So I can give them control over the mouse and keyboard, that would allow them either to physically edit parts of my presentation if we were collaborating or you know highlight some things that they want to point out and bring attention to. And one more powerful thing about the ability to meet online is that we can also see what's on each others computers. And this again becomes very powerful because Christine wants to show me something that she's got on her PC. I simple hit the change presenter button and now she's empowered to show me everything on her screen or only the things on her screen that she wants to share. It's a very powerful way to meet with people without actually having to be in the same room. Now I'm not saying you should always not have meetings with people in person because you probably get pretty lonely just sitting in your office by yourself. But you know in hard economic times saving time and saving money by being able to have very powerful meetings over the internet is very important. So this is one way that you can do it, the software is called GoToMeeting and you can check it out gotomeeting.com I think you can even try free for 30 days. GetConnected TV