At the turn of 2009, Micah knew he needed to improve his communication abilities, and started investigating business collaboration platforms and web communication packages. After reading through the Top Ten whitepaper from www.webconferencingcouncil.com  and conducting 5 different free trials, he ended up settling on VIA3 from www.viack.com  due to the array of business communication and web conferencing options it offered him. After mastering the technology he has vastly reduced his expenses and total work week, while raising the efficiency and productivity of his business.

When recruiting new business partners, he no longer has to drive from location to location, or spend hours trying to describe email attachments to people on the phone. Now he loops in a new recruit to join his business through scheduled virtual meetings. He is able to use his solution's "presentation mode" to instantly share his recruitment PowerPoint decks in real time with anyone in the meetings.

When performing financial consulting to his clients, he is able to collaborate and share sensitive financial data with VIA3 due to their built-in AES level security. He can bring up a spreadsheet in question, and pass control back and forth for joint editing purposes. Beyond the meeting, he can store, share, and swap files in the workspaces function on an ongoing basis, as well as embed relevant discussions for each document folder.

His company meetings are now all held virtually, too. Each member receives an invitation, and can click-to-join a meeting in progress. In the last meeting, all ten members of his group were participating and sharing ideas. Three of the participants delivered presentations, and one other did a real-time demonstration of an application on his machine. In all the above instances, he is able to see and share high resolution and real time audio and video, enhancing the "personal" element of the virtual meetings. They also use built-in voting and polling for anonymous voting on company resolutions that affect their group. For larger meetings, they are able to put the majority of attendees in “audience” mode, so that only presenters and hosts have audio and video in the meeting.

Now that Micah is leveraging internet technologies in such powerful ways, he considers himself an “Advanced Tele-worker”. "We didn’t imagine this level of productivity coming out of the tool," said Micah. "Now my business is exploding, and I am actually home with the family at dinner time instead of being on the road, or in my home office on the phone. This was definitely a game changer."

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Brian Back

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