Before warming up for key webconference meetings, one of my colleagues and I would get a fresh brew of coffee and get the blood rushing by playing an intense game of foosball. The game would be so fierce that you could almost feel the fragments of the foosball table particle board hit your face after jamming the ball into the walls.

After the game was complete, we'd get the web conference going. No matter how much we prepared for the meeting, there would always be a wrinkle in the plan with respect to web conference logistics. One time it was an mail outage at the customer site and the customer didn't receive the email notice of the conference. Another time it was that the customer site had a firewall in place. Yet another time, our secretary had set up the meeting but was out for the day of the conference - when the customer didn't have their unique web link login to the conference, we couldn't do much to assign a new web link for the customer because our secretary had control over assignment of new links.

Nothing is better than having this kind of stuff kill the adrenaline from the foosball warm-up ...

Ideally, I believe that one needs a web conferencing platform that is flexible and reliable enough to react to these crazy situations. Things are always going wrong in the setup of web conference meetings. GoToMeeting, a web conferencing solution by Citrix, helps out tremendously in making web conferences go right.

I posted before about my Favorite Murphy's Laws for Starting Online Meetings. Here I'll simply sum up the three GoToMeeting features that mean the most to me:

• GoToMeeting works through firewalls.
• GoToMeeting has no complicated software to install. Just a one-time applet plug-in to configure that is quick and secure.
• With GoToMeeting, there's a nice tabbed control panel that allows you quickly give people webconference instructions via three ways: by phone, by email, or by copy & paste instructions.

GoToMeeting is brought to the world by Citrix, a name that one can trust. The pricing plan is very affordable (comparison chart here). Find out how it works, and start a free trial today!

Steve Shu