Under a web conferencing or online meeting is understood on the Internet organized and conducted a "virtual" meetings between participants, which can be in real terms in very different places. In place of the real conference table occurs at a web conference of the computer desktop of the session moderator.
All participants can view in a window on their screen what is happening on the PC desktop, the moderator ("Desktop Sharing") - for example, holding a presentation, the idea of a software or editing a text document. During the Web conference, the role of facilitator to be flexible to switch between the participants (and your desktop). So they follow the main feature of location-based sessions, where - unlike, for example, to give lectures - a dialogue among many taking place ("many-to-many" principle).
To increase the interactivity or to conduct online web conferencing workshops can be supplemented by electronic meeting systems (EMS). EMS add functionality to a Web conference tools such as brainstorming, voting and discussions that can be done anonymously, as a rule, as well as a full-text documentation. They also allow the asynchronous pre-and post-processing of online meetings.
Unlike the Web conference in which two participants work together to about 20 documents and applications to use, be primarily online training webinars (so-called "e-learning") or used, for example online press conferences. To them to take part to several hundred persons, in exceptional cases even thousands. For webinar tools is the functional role of the speaker in the foreground ("One-to-many" principle).
For video conferencing is the transmission of live video streams of the participants and the conference rooms distributed in the foreground.