Microsoft Office Live Meeting Page 1
Microsoft Office Live Meeting
Fact Sheet
October 2007
Microsoft® Office Live Meeting is a Web conferencing service that enables onlinecollaboration with colleagues, customers and partners in real time, between either individuals or large groups,with just a PC and an Internet connection. Office Live Meeting helps deliver on Microsoft Corp.’s vision for unified communications, enabling people to work together better by taking the complexity out of communications.
The 2007 release of Office Live Meeting has been developed to significantly expand and improve the Web-based meeting experience.New features in Office Live Meeting will make it easier for a global work force to realize the benefits of Web conferencing from within the applications, networks and devices they already know and use. For online meetings, training and virtual events attended by up to thousands of people, Office Live Meeting offers rich interactivity, scalability and seamless integration with Microsoft Office applications, all in a familiar and easy-to-use environment.
Customer Benefits
Organizations adopt Web conferencing to avoid the high expense and logistical challenges of meetings and because of the increasingly global workforce. In addition, organizations are looking to increase the effectiveness of remote meetings by replicating the experience of face-to-face meetings.Office Live Meeting enables individuals, teams and organizations to collaborate, work with information more intelligently and leverage existing investments, which helps save time and money. Its integrated audio and video controls, document-sharing features and improved ease of use enable businesses to conduct rich, interactive meetings without the cost of business travel.
Drawing on more than 10 years of operating experience and offering built-in protection with third-party certified datacenters, Office Live Meeting provides an enterprise-class service that helps to free up IT resources for other important projects.
Key New Features and Enhancements
With the 2007 version of Office Live Meeting, Microsoft has made substantial advancements spanning every aspect of the service. Web conferencing has been brought more into the mainstream and made even more approachable to the average information worker. Some of the most notable major investments include a fully integrated media experience, deeper support for training and events, and a more streamlined user interface.
New features and enhancements to Office Live Meeting include the following:
Integrated Media Experience
- Live webcam and 360-degree panoramic video with Microsoft RoundTable. When combined with the 2007 version of Office Live Meeting, Microsoft RoundTable™ delivers an immersive conferencing experience. Meeting participants gain a panoramic view of all attendees in the conference room, as well as up-close views of individual participants as they take turns speaking. When two or more RoundTable-equipped teams participate in a meeting, the panoramic video pane will switch the video image based on “active speaker” technology.Office Live Meeting also supports hybrid scenarios where additional attendees can use webcams to join the meeting.
- Choice of VoIP, PSTN or hybrid audio. Customers can now choose from a range of options for their audio experience. Organizers can conduct meetings with voice over Internet protocol (VoIP)-only, public switched telephone network (PSTN)-only or hybrid PSTN-VoIP audio. The hybrid PSTN-VoIP audio capability is especially useful for scenarios where organizers want the majority of their attendees to use VoIP audio, but need to provide access to traveling employees participating from an airport lounge or hotel room.
- Rich media presentations. The 2007 version ofOffice Live Meeting allows presenters to incorporate virtually any media file, including Windows Media® Player and Adobe Flash formats, in their events and training sessions. Presenters upload media files to their meeting sessions the same way they would upload a Microsoft Office PowerPoint® deck. All media clips are scanned for viruses using Microsoft Forefront™ technologies before distribution to meeting attendees. Presenters can control the video playback using standard media controls.
Deeper Support for Training and Events
- Increased support for training sessions.Virtual breakout rooms, handout distributionand advanced testing and grading have been added to provide more capabilities for organizing training sessions. Event management and registration were further enhanced by new survey features and the addition of a public events page.
- New high-fidelity recordings and personal recordings. The new high-fidelity recording format allows recording of rich media presentations and playback in high fidelity.In addition to shared recordings, hosted by the Office Live Meeting service for easy access by authorized viewers, the 2007 version of Office Live Meeting provides for new personal recordings. Personal recordings may be created by users and stored locally on the computer of the meeting participant in cases when the participant needs only a personal copy.
- New collaboration tools. Polling slides are now complemented with an advanced testing and grading feature. With this new feature, trainers can comprehensively test their students’ understanding of training content. Attendees, meanwhile, benefit from the automatic delivery of test scores. A new, interactive whiteboard allows meeting participants to draw, annotate and highlight information by using rich annotation tools. Users can quickly create a diagram to illustrate a proposed process design or easily highlight the section under discussion. The enhancements in the 2007 version of Office Live Meeting include the ability to cut and paste the whiteboard drawing into other applications and support for a larger variety of fonts.
Streamlined User Experience
- Redesigned user interface. Extensive usability research has led to a redesigned user interface to help meeting participants concentrate more heavily on the content of their virtual sessions. A large viewing areaoffers a simpler, cleaner user experience, and puts increased focus on the most important part of the meeting — the content to be shared.
- Enhanced graphical layout. The new graphical layout allows participants to dock, hide and float panes. In addition, a new and less invasive toolbar has improved the application and screen sharing experience. Live Meeting Web Access, the Web-based meeting client, was also redesigned to provide a user experience that is consistent with the new Windows®-based Live Meeting client.
Pricing and Licensing
Live Meeting subscriptions are available for Live Meeting Standard Edition and Live Meeting Professional Edition. Live Meeting has a flexible pricing and licensing plan with several licensing options to choose from depending on the number of online meetings an organization expects to conduct as well as the number of participants to be accommodated. Pricing details can be found at
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For more information, press only:
Melissa Legaspi, High Road Communications, (416) 644-2296,