By combining Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) technology and individual PCs, people can meet "face-to-face" without leaving their offices. It's a unique way to reduce costly and time-consuming travel. It also allows employees to meet "face-to-face" over a desktop PC and share and review documents with colleagues, clients or vendors. You can hold a Desktop Videoconference whenever the need arises, without the time and expense of traveling-or even leaving your desk because it's just like being there in person. Desktop Videoconferencing in no way takes the place of face to fa

Frank Casanova, Director of the Apple Computer Advanced Technology Group Exploratory Products Laboratory said, "that there was little interest in Desktop Videoconferencing until reasonable bandwidth became more available. The bandwidth and capability to conduct screen to screen, real time collaboration with audio had been available for many years before personal videoconferencing. If you ask people which of the videoconferencing capabilities they would give up, the answer is almost always video". (Casanova, 1997)

Until recently, most videoconferencing was done with room videoconferencing systems, which use very sophisticated and expensive equipment to provide high-quality sound and video. Now days Desktop Videoconferencing is less expensive and can be put to use on your personal computer. Desktop Videoconferencing can never take the place of face to face communications but it does come close.

There are three capabilities of Desktop Videoconferencing. They are video, audio and collaboration. According to Barry Fishman, who runs the Covis project at Northwestern University, "In two thirds of instances that we want to use conferencing, video is irrelevant. Audio on the other hand is important to us. Screen sharing is also important to us". (Fishman, 1997)

You can send a file to someone while you are talking on the phone, and seeing their live picture on a video screen (Piedmo, 1995). Bandwidth is the amount of information that can be sent across a network in a second. Ethernet is another network connection and it is has a higher bandwidth than ISDN. Dedicated video lines are special cables used exclusively for videoconferencing. Desktop Videoconferencing also requires special software like Microsoft's NetMeeting, White Pine's CU-SeeMe to name a couple (Masayo,1997).

Bob Leader of SAP Software is convinced that effective collaboration requires face to face interaction. "He states that being able to see facial expressions, body language makes a real difference". (Leader, 1997). In an Op-ed column in the January 15, 1996 New York Times, writer Rose Moss made a point that physical settings are important to productivity and happiness as with face to face on video.

CU-SeeMe - pronounced 'see you see me' - allows you to see, hear, and speak with others. You can have a one-on-one conversation with someone running the CU-SeeMe client software, which is currently available for Macintosh and Windows. You can have a one-to-many conference by directing your CU-SeeMe client software to connect with a computer running the CU-SeeMe reflector software, currently available for UNIX. There are many public reflector sites to which you can connect. CU-SeeMe was designed and implemented to provide "desktop videoconferencing" to people sharing a high-speed network, such as a campus-wide or company-wide 10 megabit/second Ethernet local area network. Almost immediately after its public release CU-SeeMe was taken on a digital joy-ride in directions its creators never imagined. Newcomers to the Internet, old-timers, students, telecommuters, educators, and artists began to use CU-SeeMe for their work, their play, and their artistic creations. And we didn't have high-speed networks; those who could afford it used the state-of-the-art 14.4 kbps of the day. CU-SeeMe was created at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, USA

Success in the 1990s is unlikely to reside in solutions that are purely technical. A complete understanding of the process of human interaction, a respect for the cognitive and social skills of the users, an awareness of the dynamics of organizations, and the characteristics of the work force must all be accommodated if we are to ride the second wave of innovation to successful adoption in the 1990s encounters (Egido, 1988,16).

Masayo Miyake, the managing director for construction and installation, according to the November 22, 1997 issue of Electronics, believed that "video phones will be used more to transmi

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Approximate Word count = 3180
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page double spaced)