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	Session

Overview

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Session from Wave Three Software is an impressive application, the first one that I can see effectively bridging the long-standing barrier between Mac and PC users.

While there are still a few rough edges to be smoothed out, Session provides effective audio and videoconferencing with excellent quality, application/desktop sharing, one-click remote control and an effective presentation multi-slide whiteboard that can accommodate images, photos and live annotation form all live participants.

"Session takes advantage of increasing processing power in general-purpose computers to deliver audio, video and collaborative application performance that is comparable, or superior, to expensive dedicated video conferencing hardware."

Session software operates in a “peer-to-peer” or P2P fashion allowing for sigificant benefits in specific application areas such as presentation and collaborative whiteboarding.

A text chat facility is included.

Interface is very simple and easy to understand upon first use. More complex options are well hidden inside Preferences and Options controls.

Session works adaptively evaluating the amount of bandwidth and resources available to each participant. For effective full-motion videoconferencing a minimum of 128 Kbps is effectively required.

People on 56K lines can still connect to any Session-powered meeting and work only with the audio portion of the conference. In most cases greatest limitations will affect video and the ability to participate or deliver application-sharing sessions, due to the high bandwidth nature of this task. On the other hand Session supports effectively whiteboarding and presentation through its dedicated facility by leveraging a P2P approach to sharing and presenting documents. Each visual, slide or document to be showcased is in fact first distributed to all participating computers and then called up at will by the presenter commands.

Performance of audio and video is absolutely outstanding and on a par with the best other software-based desktop video conferencing tools available on the market today (namelyVidiTel).

Audio is full-duplex, meaning that everyone can talk at the same time. Your microphone is always open from the first moment you connect to someone else, and under optimal circumstances (good connection speeds and good quality microphone) the results are nothing short of outstanding.

Quite differently from most other providers (offering a turnkey, "platform" solution working across endpoints utilizing the same technology), Wave Three is dedicated to providing standards-based solutions that customers can implement in the way that best meets their requirements and best fits with their existing network.

WaveThree is therefore characterized by the fact that it does not offer the solution as a "platform", as it doesn't want to preclude the opportunity for its customers to integrate and implement existing or other preferred network components. Wave Three is in fact capable of audio interoperability with Microsoft XP Messenger, SIPC and hard phones from Nortel, Cisco and SNOM.

Session can also interoperate with SIP registrars from Ubiquity, SNOM, Indigo, Nortel, Cisco/Vovida, WorldCom, and others.

Let me emphasize even more that because Wave Three Session uses the SIP standard, communication is not limited to other Wave Three Session end users. Any user equipped with an interoperable SIP-compliant communication device will work with Wave Three’s real-time communication platform. This includes users with computer-based applications like “soft-phones” and, as mentioned, special-purpose SIP phones available from a number of companies like Cisco, Avaya and Nortel.

The shared whiteboard, MediaSpace, provides some interesting facilities, including:

a) multiple slides

b) the ability to import/drag and drop images in most file formats

c) live annotation tools

d) playback functionality in full screen mode

This would effectively allow for the delivery of Powerpoint presentations across Mac and PC platforms. One would need only to save all slides in a graphic file format and then to place them on separate slides inside MediaSpace. MediaSpace includes a media library panel allowing you to store images that you may want to keep handy and available during a live conference or presentation.

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Posted on October 20, 2003 at 08:42 AM

Updated on December 08, 2004 at 09:43 PM

Overview