Google online Meeting Tools

According to statistics from the American Community Survey, telecommuting has risen 79 percent between 2005 and 2012, with approximately 3.2 million workers doing their thing from home. This number only includes full-time employees who work from home for someone other than themselves at least half the time.

Now let’s add in self-employed consultants and virtual freelancers and that number skyrockets and enforces a trend in the workplace and mindset that will not soon be going away, but continually increasing.

With this new way of working comes the need for better communication and collaboration tools. In response to this, Citrix, a leader in mobile workspaces providing virtualization, mobility management, networking and cloud services to enable new ways to work better, has introduced a new version of GoToMeeting Free. An extension of its popular online meeting tool, this latest version is answering the call from virtual workers who wanted a more simple collaboration tool that offered the features they need to get things done.

As a guy who is constantly on the ‘go’ and who works with a virtual team who helps me keep things moving in my many projects, I too am always looking for better tools that allow me to get more done faster. So I was pretty thrilled when I saw this new product and the features it offered.

Here’s four reasons it’s a winner in my book:

1) It’s Instant

When I say instant…I mean instant. I send my custom URL (oh yeah…you get to claim a custom URL so that you can easily remember your personal ‘online meeting room’) to whomever I want to meet with – they click, I click and we are meeting. That’s it – we’re meeting! No phone numbers or access codes to remember, no trying to figure out how to get the ‘hang-out’ connected…just click, connect and meet.

2) Meet and Share Content

Have you ever had that endless email exchange with someone trying to collaborate on something and you just wished you could both be looking at the same thing at the same time so you could get it done and move on?

Well, GoToMeeting Free has you covered here as well. Simply go from video to screen sharing – from either side – during your meeting or quickly share documents by dragging and dropping them onto the screen. Simple.

3) It’s Mobile

Because I’m always on the go, mobile is a big deal for me. GoToMeeting Free works on Google Chrome and Firefox browsers and on Android mobile devices. So while I’m on the train with my Galaxy S4 phone, I can have a quick meeting with my director of operations whose back in her office. And if we need to, we can circle in our director of marketing, because GoToMeeting Free allows up to three participants.