In nearly eight years at IBM, I've never been involved in a videoconference. Until today.

One of our architects has taken on an advocacy role for a customer in Denmark, and as such the video conference was the most practical way of introducing himself without the relative anonymity of a straightforward phone call. I tagged along to help answer any questions they had about WS-Security.

I have to say that apart from the introductions at the start where it is obviously preferable to put a face to the name, the rest of the meeting would have been much better served by a teleconference and an e-meeting. The audio quality of the video conference was poor, whilst trying to view shared documents on a low resolution TV screen was laughable.

It was particularly annoying when they started to tuck into the cakes the Danish IBM host had provided for them