Within LPI, we have been trying to look at ways to reduce our conference call expenses, given that we are a small nonprofit organization trying to focus our limited dollars on delivering our services rather than on operating expenses.  We've lately been trying conference calls via Skype and they work okay, but there are two issues: 1) the current Skype conf call setup only allows a maximum of five participants (one host and five participants); and 2) when the audio quality is good, it's very good, but when it's poor, it's really poor.  We had to abandon and then restart a conf call last night when the person hosting it had too little bandwidth.  At least, we guess it is that because when someone with more bandwidth hosted it, the quality was markedly better.

So we are looking around at a variety of different solutions, both hosted and run on our own servers, and then someone realized that he already knew of a system that could work from his gaming background... a product/program called Teamspeak.    What is this product for?  Well, it seems to have originally been (and still is) targeted at groups of people playing online games.  I could imagine people playing Doom, Halo, etc. and all joining into essentially a conference bridge where they can talk to each other as they shoot each other up.  Or, in some of the larger team environments, all members of a team could join in to a single conference session to coordinate their activities, very much as army personnel (today) might do with their earmikes all tuned to the same channel.

Somewhere along the line, though, someone there at Teamspeak seems to have realized that there was far greater potential and now is positioning it as a general audioconferencing application.  The nice thing for LPI is that the license terms make it free for nonprofits.  The client app runs on either Windows and Linux, is trivial to install and so far seems to, like Skype, work right through most firewalls and network configurations.  Voice quality was decent although I haven't yet participated in a large call.  All in all it seems like an interesting tool for nonprofits or gamers. (Or businesses willing to pay for usage.)

My tip for them would be that if they do want to expand into businesses, they might want to find a better term than "Clan" for the name of the team you are part of!  :-)  That seems a bit hokey for someone using it for business. ("Hey, login and join my clan!")

It was just interesting to see that yet again, gamers are leading the way when it comes to some innovative tools. (As has been the case in so many other things within the annals of computing.)

Tags: audioconferencing, voip