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Virtual meeting environments are providing a viable alternative for conventional meetings bringing benefits of reduced costs and better use of time by removing the need for attendees to travel to national, international or global locations in order to attend meetings. This paper builds on the work of previous papers which discussed the functional and technical requirements for a virtual meeting system, reporting on a user trial and evaluating the prototype system. The trial was performed by students as users deploying the prototype for collaboration in group work focussed on the design of a computer system as part of the final year of their undergraduate study. The users were asked to comment on the features of the prototype as well as offering suggestions on useful features that should be included in a virtual meeting system. A summary of their comments and suggestions and the results of the evaluation are included in the paper. Security aspects of virtual meeting systems are also considered in some detail.

With the growth of virtual organisations and multinational companies, virtual collaboration tasks are becoming more important for employees. This paper describes the development of a virtual meeting system, called V-ROOM. An exploration of facilities required in such a system has been conducted. The findings highlighted that intelligent systems are needed, especially since information that individuals have to know and process, is vast. The survey results showed that meeting summarisation is one of the most important new features that should be added to virtual meeting systems for enterprises. This paper highlights the innovative methods employed in V-ROOM to produce relevant meeting summaries. V-ROOM's approach is compared to other methods from the literature and it is shown how the use of meta-data provided by parts of the V-ROOM system can improve the quality of summaries produced.