NOLC: Network and Online Consulting

Project Description Consulting on evaluation, purchase, installation, and use of software plays a prominent role in today’s software business. There are many attempts to replace human consultants by sophisticated help utilities, electronic wizards and elaborated Web sites. But they all have two major drawbacks: First, they cannot (yet) answer a specific question. They can only offer a database of knowledge, which has to be queried by the user. Second, they are not human. For support, many users prefer a human counterpart to a machine. But human manpower is expensive, individual (on-site) consulting even more so as time consuming travelling adds to the costs. The aim of the Network and on-line Consulting project is to reduce cost in consulting. This aim was achieved by providing a platform that supports on-line connections between one or several clients and one or several consultants. Clients and consultants may communicate via different services like chat, audio, video, file transfer, white boards and application sharing.