Microsoft Upgrades Virtual Meetings Technology

Microsoft Corp. announced a set of applications designed to improve virtual meetings by integrating communications through web conferencing, instant messaging, email, and traditional and web-based telephony.

In a web conference, company chairman Bill Gates said that real-time collaboration is “one of the big frontiers that (Microsoft) Office is moving ahead on.”

Most significant for meeting planners, Microsoft has upgraded its web-conferencing application, Live Meeting, which can accommodate meetings with hundreds of virtual attendees but is primarily used for groups of 20 or fewer people.

New to Live Meeting, the application can deliver the audio portion of a web conference via streaming audio over the Internet in addition to the telephone, the most common way now for delivering audio for web conferencing. Meeting moderators and speakers can control the audio portion directly from the application, dialing in other participants to speak.

Organisations also can now deploy the Live Meeting portal on their Intranets to automate administrative functions such as account setup and password reset, and provide users automated logon to their accounts.

Microsoft also announced a new instant messaging program for business, called Microsoft Office Communicator. The application can track whether users are online or available for a meeting and can route messages to telephones, emails, and instant messages so that colleagues can connect and meet whether they are working at their computers or available via mobile phones or personal digital assistants.