Following a month-long pilot, the Irish Computer Society (ICS) has launched an online conferencing service to allow members to participate in seminars and briefings from home, office or while travelling abroad.
Commenting on the development, ICS professional services manager Tom O’Sullivan said: “Though headquartered in Dublin, the ICS membership is nationwide. The E-Touch online videoconferencing solution allows us to make lectures and presentations available to members and the public, regardless of location, platform or speed of connection. This adds tremendous value to the ICS offering and enhances our appeal to IT professionals located outside Dublin.”
The E-Touch videoconferencing software was provided free of charge by Onlinemeetingrooms.com, the Irish and UK service reseller for the software. E-Touch allows numerous geographic locations to be brought together simultaneously in a private online meeting room using any web browser-enabled device, including PCs, Macs and PDAs, over dial-up, DSL and wireless connections. The software is very user-friendly with nothing to download or install to use the solution.
The ICS webcast will support a wide range of configurations. Where users do not have a webcam or microphone at their disposal they can use online messaging as an alternative way of communicating with other users and trial users have even reported acceptable performance over dial-up connections.
The introduction of the new service coincides with the launch of the autumn schedule of ICS events, which features a diverse range of topics including information quality, mobile computing and IT architecture.
By Brian Skelly
