Microsoft® Unified Communications: Conferencing

Businesses today operate andcompete in multiple markets, with employees, partners and customers located around their region or the globe. Staying connected and collaborating effectively is essential. But the question is: how can we do thiswhile maximizing people’s time and keeping the travel cost in control?

Microsoft’s conferencing solution gives you the power to work together with colleagues, customers, prospects and business partners, no matter where you are. For online meetings, training or events, conferencing provides the effective meeting solution that enables you to collaborate with groups of two into the thousands—without leaving your desk. With everyone participating from their PCs or local meeting rooms, you can kick off a project, brainstorm ideas, edit files, collaborate on white boards, or negotiate deals at a fraction of the cost and hassle of travel.

Conferencing is a key element of Microsoft unified communications. Microsoft’s unified communications combines e-mail, voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), instant messaging and audio-, video- and web conferencing into an integrated, intuitive system built around people, not technology. And it’s all built into the Microsoft Office system the world knows and trusts.

Flexible Conferencing Options

Microsoft offers a full range of conferencing options, with a choice of servers managed on-premise or fully hosted services. Office Communications Server 2007 provides web conferencing to users via an on-premise solution residing inside the corporate firewall, offering high security and full control. Office Live Meeting is a web conferencing service hosted outside the corporate firewall.

Office Communications Server conferencing is ideal for companies that have corporate or industry requirements to keep data behind the corporate firewall or have already deployed or in process of deploying instant messaging or voice in addition to Web conferencing. Office Live Meeting is suited for companies that have limited IT resources or have training or events needs.

Both options enable you to take advantage of audio-, video-, and web- conferencing capabilities. Users can connect to Office Communications Server or to Office Live Meeting using the same client, offering a consistent experience. With a common client, only one desktop image is needed and user training is minimized.

Streamlined Communications

Office Communicator client allows users to click to communicate the right people and information, at the right time, directly from within familiar Office desktop applications and line of business applications.

Scheduling conferences is easy. Integration with Outlook client allows you to schedule conferences in advance, by seeing people’s future availability from their Outlook calendars. Or you can choose to “Meet Now” whenever the need arises. With Microsoft conferencing solution, you can see presence, or people’s real time availability, based on calendar information, login/activity status, phone on-hook/off-hook, and user preference. Often users will start with a simple email or instant message, and then decide they need to use more interactive conferencing to solve the issue. In such cases, they can easily escalate the email or instant message into a conference by the single click ofa button.

Geographically dispersed teams benefit from improved collaboration and decision making with interactive audio-, video-, and web- conferencing and enhanced scheduling. You can easily extend conferencing capabilities to users who want to join an “in person meeting” remotely. Web conferencing provides a virtual meeting experience that integrates data, presentations, documents, video, voice, media, and text to enable real-time communication and collaboration. Microsoft conferencing solution provides built-in 1:1 and multi-party audio and video conferencing out-of-the-box.

Microsoft conferencing solution also features active speaker detection and panorama views via Microsoft RoundTable (an audio-video collaboration product with a unique 360-degree camera), so participants can easily converse and share information as if they were physically in the room with one another.

Operational Efficiency

Microsoft’s conferencing solution enables more efficient deployment by leveraging Active Directory for a single user directory for communications. With conferencing built-into Office Communications Server, you can leverage your investments in Active Directory, management tools and Windows-skilled professionals while delivering a solution integrated with your other communications solutions such as e-mail, instant messaging, or VoIP. Live Meeting Intranet Portal automatically creates user accounts and authenticates with Active Directory so you can roll-out the solution rapidly and easily. This means lower administrative costs and less time managing accounts.

Microsoft’s conferencing solution provides enterprise- grade reliability and scale that you can count on. Built on a platform with proven scale for enterprise communications on the PC, Office Communications Server 2007 provides IT control over failover, redundancy, and scalabilityacross your organization. Live Meeting’s record of high availability is proven by a decade of operating experience and backed by the resources of a Fortune 100 company.

Built-In Protection

Office Communications Server allows VPN-less access for secure conferencing on any network. Deployed inside the corporate firewall, both internal and external communications are encrypted by default (TLS/SRTP) and the capabilities can be administratively enabled or limited including federated organizations.

Live Meeting offers a high level of security. Cybertrust and SAS70 certified data centers provide security enhanced content storage. More secure communication across firewalls, SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) data encryption, strong password authentication policies and 128-bit encryption combine to dramatically improve security.

Future-Ready

With Microsoft conferencing solution, companies can choose from range of options for their audio experience. Organizations can conduct meetings with PSTN-only (Public Switched Telephone Network), VoIP-only, or hybrid PSTN/VoIP audio, so remote workers at home or on the road can also easily join conferences no matter where they are.

Microsoft’s conferencing is software- based solution, so you can replace conflicting systems with a single, unified communications platform that leverages your existing data and telecommunications infrastructure. IT departments can deliver more flexible, more secure communications, with simplified infrastructure that streamlines management and reduces total cost of ownership.

Learn More

Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Web site:

Microsoft Office Communications Server TechCenter:

Microsoft Office Live Meeting Web site:

Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 Web site:

For more information, please visit

©2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This document is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. The example companies, organizations, products, domain names, e-mail addresses, logos, people, places, and events depicted herein are fictitious. No association with any real company, organization, product, domain name, e-mail address, logo, person, places, or events is intended or should be inferred. Microsoft, the Office logo, Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, Exchange Server, Visual Studio, Windows, Office Communications Server and Windows Mobile are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.