Microsoft Office Live Meeting

Microsoft Office Live Meeting is an online meeting space your organization can subscribe to hosts internally. It provides real-time collaboration, even over long distances, letting you meet with your colleagues online. Microsoft Office Live Meeting allows you to connect to meetings with hundreds of participants, giving you and other meeting participants the power too deliver a presentation, kick-off a project, brainstorm ideas, edit files, collaborate on whiteboards, and negotiate deals from their personal computer – all at a fraction of the cost and without the hassle of travel. Microsoft provides a hosted model for Microsoft Office Live Meeting as well as a CPE (customer premise equipment) solution and software downloadable free of charge. In addition, a Java-based console is available for increased flexibility in applications.

A vast number of organizations use Office Live Meeting for staff training and information dissemination to both customers and partners alike. Live Meeting sessions are recordable; therefore participants who were not present at the original meeting may still be updated. Live meeting organizers are able to keep attendees engaged and focused during sessions while speakers or presenters can receive feedback from participants in real-time. Meeting pace and content may be adjusted according to the needs of the audience by allowing constant simultaneous interactivity and collaboration.

Integrated Communication Features

Office Live Meeting 2007 supplies participants with integrated audio, video, and web multimedia. A variety of communication features including live and recorded video, chat, application sharing, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and public switched telephone network (PSTN) audio services, as well as audience feedback tools are available.

Premium Conferencing Solution

Microsoft Office Live Meeting is a premium conferencing solution for businesses with award-winning, enterprise-class services. Its high availability, along with more than 10 years of operating experience and unmatched service and security features, provides companies with the perfect solution for their conferencing needs. It is converged software that allows interoperability with live audio conferencing, and features highly flexible options for controlling PSTN lines, such as muting specific participants and kicking participants from the session. User accounts are grouped together with unique URLs in Conference Centers starting with www.livemeeting.com/cc/. . . or www.placeware.com/cc/. . . Participants are not required to pay anything when joining a Live Meeting session as billing is done on an account basis. Accounts are usually supplied by resell providers offering per-minute or monthly standard rates.

Live Meeting Web Access (MWA) was redesigned to provide users with an experience similar to Windows Live Meeting. Live Meeting Web Access is a Java applet therefore it is compatible with non-Windows operating systems such as Solaris and Mac. Microsoft has also added a new feature, the Microsoft Roundtable – a 360-degree video camera. With specifically engineered microphone technology, Roundtable cams can determine the location of an active speaker to automatically indicate which camera angle to focus on.

Current and existing users on the Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 version will find the new Meet Now button as a Microsoft Outlook Add-In that you can use from Outlook to create impromptu meetings. In addition, the new Office Communications Server 2007 R2 is now enabled with a new Conferencing Auto Attendant feature for bridging Computer Audio and dial-in attendees. Clients wanting to attend an Office Live Meeting audio conference without computer access can now participate in conferencing through the use of any conventional phone. In creating schedules for conferences, organizers can add a conference call number to the meeting to allow potential participants to use any phone system to participate in the audio portion of the Live Meeting.