Time, money, resources. Three elements which we're always short on; three elements we're always trying to save on. Yet, for our everyday work, in this cooperating, work-sharing world, meeting is a growingly essential need: meeting "face-to-face", with a chance to share and cooperate on the same data in real time, and interface with other people. A need which traditionally costs (unfortunately) a lot of time, a lot of moeny, and a lot of resources: we need to find the right place for the meeting, ask each of the participants to reach it, often facing traffic and delays, and py not just for their work, but also for their transfers.

Should we conclude that optimizing resources and this essential need to work together are incompatible? Should "meetings" alwats have these two faces, irrenounceable work tool on one side and colossal waste on the other?

Fortunately, not anymore. Among the wonderful Innovations allowed for by digital technologies, one is rapidly gaining ground and importance: videoconference.

When we say "videoconference", we don't just mean a glorified chatroom, or some sort of group phone call with added video: although it is true that both things may have some things in common with what we mean, a videoconference is far, far more.

Having a videoconference does not just mean, actually, putting all attendees in video and audio contact, exactly as if they were in the same room; it also means creating a shared workspace for them, a parallel of a "meeting room table" where material useful to the discussion may be brought to the attention of everyone and worked on by each attendee.

A useless complication? A technological "fad" which offers very little? On the contrary. Let us consider one of the best success stories of a leading Company in the field, Essedi, who built the audio-video teleconference system for the Regional Headquarters of the Civil Protection in Friuli Venezia Giulia, in the north of Italy.

The new system that has been implemented allows to have all the data streaming in from peripheric stations converging on the Operating Room. The effect for operators is that of a total immersion in the emergency they're managing; this is because videoconference does not just allow simple communication between distant operators, but also directly shared analysis of all incoming data, and evaluation of the actual damage as shown on streaming video. All this leads to a far more organic crisis management. A result which definitely should cancel the perception of videoconference as a "manager toy", as too often happens with advanced technological systems like this one.

What remains to be told is how a system like this can be useful in a normal Company, which surely does not rouitinely face emergencies of the magnitude and gravity that civil Protection is familiar with. Well, to put it briefly: in all those cases where a direct, productive meeting between physically distant professionals was needed, the traditional solution was expensive both money and time-wise: arranging for them to actually meet in person. Now, meeting - and we mean really meeting, with the ability to talk, share and analyze data and graphs at the same time, in a way that a phone call could never allow for - has become as simple as just sitting at one's desk and activating the videoconference terminal.