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	SmartMeeting

Desktop - Application Sharing

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smartMeeting integrates a full document sharing facility, which allows any of the virtual office participants to upload and share any document file live. These may include Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, images, statistical graphs and more.

The content management area, accessible at the bottom right of the smartMeeting interface (when not in Full Screen mode), is simple and very easy to use. The command "Click to Share", while inconsistently labeled, provides immediates access to a direct Upload facility.

The document sharing facility leverages Microsoft Internet Explorer technology to seamlessly open several standard Office document files including those from Word, Excel, PowerPoint and several others.

The requirement for this facility to work across all document sharing instances, even when sharing a document file type not immediately recognized by Internet Explorer, is to ensure that everyone participating in the document sharing session has an installed copy of the program needed to create/edit the document being shared. This means that if I want to share an Excel file for collaborative editing, everyone in the office needs to have Excel already installed on their PC.

Document files uploaded can be easily deleted or saved locally to the disk of any office participant.

When sharing documents each meeting participant has access to a personal "instance" of the document file. No one can drive other participants to view the same content section of a document as in traditional application sharing facilities, and each modification to the document remains localized to the one user making it.

Cons:

Depending on the type of file being opened the document may not be opened inside the presentation area but rather within a new window containing the originating/editing application.

It is unclear to the end user whether he can edit collaboratively these documents or not and what happens to the edit contributions from others.

Since the original application that created the document being shared is required to display it, it needs to be loaded in the background and therefore access to this facility may be a little slow for those not having the highest performing PCs.