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	Microsoft Live Meeting

Overview

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I have just finished giving an initial round of testing and exploration to the revamped Placeware platform now dressed in an elegant and even more feature-rich Microsoft Live Meeting suit.

The interface is overall simple, well organized and unobtrusive. It appears as a great effort was placed into simplifying and unifying the overall interface and conferencing metaphor in order to somehow dispel the need for the end user to understand features and controls while instead providing an interface more oriented at serving some of our more familiar concepts such slides and showing.

The main toolbar is indeed very simple and it contains only 10 buttons grouped into three sections. The first two sections are basically devoted to navigation buttons and presentation-related functions (import or choose a presentation). The third and richer section is devoted to all of the other basic facilities of a typical Web conferencing system:

a) Desktop/application sharing

b) Web-touring, co-browsing

c) Whiteboarding

d) Text chat

Actually, Live Meeting sports an extra facility specifically devoted to taking screenshots and labelled "Insert Snapshot Slide". The tool is effective and very useful indeed. It provides a floating and resizable empty frame which can be dragged anywhere on screen. As it remains always on top of all other open applications, it is easy to call up anyone document or program, frame the part to be "photographed" and click the only button available on the frame border.

Importing and managing PowerPoint presentations is indeed very effective. Navigation controls are excellent and other unique features that originated with Placeware such as the "Automatic Slide Cycling" are all still available.

Live Meeting has also a standard set of menus like any normal application.

These menus include the typical File, Edit, View, Insert and Help (just like a Mac circa in the late 80s) selections available in most standard applications. To my surprise I found the commands available inside the menus extremely easy to understand and it really took me only a few seconds to make good sense of all of them. Impressive usability.

In the unified metaphor adopted inside Live Meeting everything to be shown must become a "slide" and the terminology is all centered around this "presentation" concept.

Live Meeting converts all of the visual content to be presented online to a static image file that it then get shared with all meeting participants. This creates less confusion about Web touring versus Application sharing and allows Web pages to be easily co-scrolled. By itself this last point shows a simple and elegant workaround and is quite a first in this industry (second only to the fascinating PageShare unique proprietary technology).

Application sharing has been greatly improved at least from a user interface standpoint and usability viewpoint. The controls are now simpler and easier to use and one can now easily "pause" while sharing an application (perhaps to correct something) or hand out with a click of a button the control of any application on your computer to one of your meeting participants.

If you can afford over USD $ 700 for a 10-people room while paying international phone rates at skyrocketing prices, this is the tool for you.

Key press references

What is new in the PlaceWare service is a Windows-based client that users can download. The client gives presenters more controls while participants get expanded viewing options and feedback tools such as chat, Callison said. The Windows client comes in addition to a Web-based Java client that PlaceWare will continue to offer for broad reach.
On the back end, PlaceWare, which operates as a wholly-owned Microsoft subsidiary, has increased scalability and reliability in a clustered server environment. Its systems in three data centers, which run on a combination of Windows and Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Solaris, can now handle 250,000 concurrent meeting participants for a customer, according to Callison.

Microsoft with PlaceWare offers Web conferencing as a hosted service only, competing with WebEx and other players. Oracle and IBM not only offer Web conferencing as a hosted service, but also sell server software for companies to run their own Web conferences.

Source:InfoworldSept. 2003

Integration with the new Office 2003 products is minimal. Users can download add-ons for Outlook and MSN Messenger enabling them to start a Web conference from the Microsoft e-mail and instant-messaging (IM) clients.

Source: InfoworldSept. 2003

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Posted on September 30, 2003 at 02:07 PM

Updated on October 10, 2003 at 08:31 AM

Overview