
			Facilities			Products


	Microsoft Live Meeting

Annotation Features - WhiteBoard

« File Sharing | Main | Recording »

The new live annotation and mark-up tools inside Microsoft Live Meeting show some great ideas while maintaining many limitations too.

Finally designed with some intelligence, interface and information design rationale and with a pragmatical approach the Live Meeting annotation tools include a "live cursor" to point at items being showcased during a session, and all of the basic drawing objects are available: lines, rectangles, ovals, polylines and freehand are all neatly accessible under a one-icon button.

This implementation represents one of the closest examples of what an ideal live annotation toolkit should look like demonstrating in practical terms how much less means more when collaborating and presenting online.

Limitations

On the negative side there are no options to select color, thickness or styles for these objects which severely limits the range of their applications.

Even the text annotation tool offers no option to set text size or font for its use.

Finally it is not possible to show/hide annotations but only to draw and erase them (see Linktivity WebDemo for a great implementation).

« File Sharing | Main | Recording »

Posted on October 02, 2003 at 01:03 PM

Updated on November 17, 2003 at 03:22 PM

Overview

Key Strengths

Weak Points

PowerPoint Presentation Facilities

Web Touring - Co-Browsing

Presence Awareness

Multi-Protocol IM