Virtual Meeting Software to Augment Office Hours

Hello all,

My wife is a college professor at a state university. Our state's recent cutbacks, however, have caused her classes to grow larger and larger in size. This is making it so that traditional "office hours" are not effective. With many students, there isn't a block of time that everyone has free and the number of individual appointments becomes unwieldy.

What we would like to do is set up a system where she can conference with students during off hours over the internet. Ideally, both she and the student would be able to view a word document, as is done with Microsoft's SharedView, and would be able to voice chat.

My first thought was to use SharedView and Ventrillo together, but this poses two problems: Many students use macs (no SharedView for OS X), and setting up two programs with two user accounts increases the level of complexity for those students who are less technologically proficient. So this is not an idea solution

Do you have any other ideas or recommendations? The goal is one program, available for free or cheap (at least for the client), that allows two users to view the same document and voice chat, and two works on both windows and macs.

Resource wise, I have a computer which is on 24/7 and it runs Vista Ultimate. This would be available if the program needed some sort of background server. My wife's computer runs Home Premium. If it helps, I have a dyndns domain set up, so if the program needs to link with an IP address, that would be available as well. I also have a copy of Microsoft Office 2007 Enterprise. If we have to spend a little bit of money, that would be fine too; however, our budget is by no means endless and this is coming out of our own pocket.


Thanks for the help.