Microsoft Office Efficiency guide, for Microsoft customers. Distributed with national press, including The Daily Telegraph, spring 2005.

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The high price of meetings
Noel Edmonds, of Saturday Swap Shop fame, on the broader value of collaborative technology

Anyone of a certain generation will remember Noel Edmonds from BBC 1 on Saturday mornings, where his innovative Swap Shop TV programme for kids mixed pop star interviews with the chance to swap unwanted rollerskates for the latest Sindy doll. The programme pioneered the use of the telephone for enabling viewers to interact with the show and its guests; previously the only means of corresponding with the BBC was by letter.

Fast-forward 30 years and Edmonds is still innovating. Today he runs a number of businesses, with offices in Devon, London and Manchester. It was splitting his time between these three locations that sparked his interest in videoconferencing eight years ago.

This brings him to his latest mission, to persuade the nation's senior executives to radically cut down their business travel. Edmonds is chairman of the Meeting Without Moving Foundation, which works closely with business support organisations such as the IoD to promote the strategic use of collaborative technologies among UK businesses.

He is also chairman of the Unique Group of companies, which includes VMC, one of the UK's foremost providers of videoconferencing systems and support services, and the face2face nationwide network, which makes over 350 video meeting rooms available to the public for just £50 an hour. "The challenge now is to get people to use them instead of heading for the motorway," Edmonds notes.

"Many managers still don't have a strategic approach to meetings, and couldn't tell you what these cost the company over a year. To get companies embracing videoconferencing and collaborative technologies needs a change in people's mindsets."

For Edmonds, the vision for the future is one of being able to be in email contact with someone, then be able to click a button to initiate real-time video contact over the Web.

Indeed, the Polycom videoconferencing systems deployed in the nationwide face2face are the subject of a major strategic alliance with Microsoft, which sees Polycom's video and audio conferencing products being integrated with Microsoft Windows Messenger, to allow users to transition effortlessly from an instant messaging session to a multipoint audio or video session, providing a rich media collaboration experience that will enable faster decision-making and greater productivity across workgroups and remote workers.

"This is the 'untravel' business," Edmonds notes. "We're competing with the airlines and train companies. Why would I want to spend £200 travelling with Great Western to London and back from Exeter when I can save my time as well as the fare, to achieve exactly the same results from where I am now?"

It's a good point.