It might not be something new to a gamer, but for those who dont know there are such VOIP applications ever exist. In the gaming space, there are many 2 major applications being used. First and the most popular Teamspeak & second Ventrilo
These killer applications gamers have been using for long. Lets first look at them before discussing how it can be used by corporates/SOHO businesses to collaborate teams.
1) TeamSpeak: This software created a revolution in the multiplayer gaming around a couple of years back. Before teamspeak, people used to use those in game voice commands, which needs the player to press a certain key before talking. That irritates the gamers to say the least. Imagine your enemy standing in front of you and you want to call for help. You start looking for that voice command key and boom headshot. :--)
Teamspeak thought the same, they wanted to create an application which needs less bandwidth (Noob Knowledge: Multiplayer games are bandwidth hungry and little lag can make a you NOOB) and platform independent. They finally creates Teamspeak 1.0 , the initial version has VOIP as its backbone and could offer all basic functions needed by the gamer. Popularly knows TS in the gaming space, this application never looked back. Today it offers more than enough features including different audio codecs for optimum performance.
I almost forgot to mention that Teamspeak is FREE for non-commercial use. If you want to use it commercially, you need to buy a license.
We will look at how to implement Teamspeak for SOHO & Small Business in the later part of this post.
2) Ventrilo: A follower of Teamspeak, the ventrilo application looks a bit different than TS. Almost all of the features are identical and there is not much change. Some people however noticed that Ventrilo performs better on some games and lags behind on others. Ventrilo is mostly used by MMORPG & Real-Time strategy games.
I personally like Teamspeak over Ventrilo. I have seen and faced some issues with Ventilo using a Firewall.
Now we got introduction to these gaming VOIP tools. Lets look at how it can be used by a SOHO or Small businesses to collaborate their teams across countries or cities.
Before you start thinking about Skype as a solution for Voice Conferencing, Let me tell you that you cant have more than 10 skype users conferencing at any point of time. There is also an limitation to that, you need to have a dual core CPU to handle 10 people conference or else you gotta live with only 5 people max. There is also something called Skypecast. However its works like a public Web conference.
So what if you have people in USA, Germany, India and rest of APAC, say about 16., You can use Skype? No you cant?
This is where Teamspeak or Ventrilo can do wonders? Lets see how we can setup this conference facility for a small business with 20 people separated geographically.
1) We need to download the Server version of TeamSpeak or Ventrilo
2) Now install & Setup the server using help provided on Teamspeak & Ventrilo homepage and Guide.
3) You can now setup new users and assign them password. This is very important since you want it be used by a specific set of people and not by anyone.
4) It also providers a web interface to easily manage server password, user management etc.
5) Ask your team members to download the client from respective websites.
6) Give them their username/password and the server IP.
7)Boom they are in. They can configure their client for codec's etc.
8 )You can set a participant as admin or host of the teamspeak.
9) you can set filters for chat etc.
The cost involved in minimum just the cost of setting up a server, which you might have for backups etc and some licensing fee to be paid to Teamspeak.
I hope this guide helped you in understanding how to setup a quick conferencing for a small group of people.
If you want any specific guides, please let me know and i will try to cover them on this blog. Please subscribe this blog for more such cool guides & hacks.
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