Microsoft has unveiled Office Live Meeting, the first
service offered as part of its Office productivity suite,
signalling its move to bring online meetings into the enterprise
collaboration platform fold.
Earlier this year Microsoft acquired PlaceWare and has enhanced
and renamed the company's PlaceWare Conference Center Service. Live
Meeting will continue the PlaceWare legacy, competing against
market leader WebEx Communications and a host of other players.
The primary retooling to the PlaceWare technology comes in the
form of a native Windows client for Microsoft Office Live Meeting.
This will extend the original browser access mode to include a
familiar Windows look and feel. It offers context-sensitive and
file/edit/view menus for the management of meetings, as well as
other Windows features such as keyboard shortcuts, roll-over icons,
and the ability to drag and drop panels. The service will continue
to support the browser client to ensure broad reach, but the
Windows console will feature more functionality.
In this initial incarnation, Live Meeting has not yet been
integrated into Office and as such will not immediately alter
enterprise decision-making for web conferencing, according to Meta
Group senior vice president Mike Gotta.
"Right now, [Microsoft has] an uphill battle to rebrand and
reconstitute themselves as someone who can run an online service,"
Gotta said.
"The tipping point will come when Microsoft ties the hosted
offerings to the Office family of products," Gotta said.
The Office Live Meeting service will eventually be complemented
with server software offerings to give enterprises the option to
choose hosted services, to install server infrastructure behind the
firewall, or a combination of the two, according to Jennifer
Callison, director of marketing at Microsoft's real-time
collaboration business unit.
"Our vision is that the best strategy is a server-service
continuum. It is better if both offerings are available - invisible
to users whether they are accessing server or service," Callison
said.
This future infusion into Office is Microsoft's key advantage,
according to Mark Levitt, research vice president of collaborative
computing at IDC.
Although other suppliers have basic integration with Outlook and
other products, Microsoft will always have an advantage to provide
better packaging and integration of their products with each other
than the competition, Levitt said.
But because PlaceWare technology was neither Windows- nor
.net-based, Microsoft must convert the technology to Windows before
it can introduce software or provide hooks into Office - no small
task, according to Levitt.
"I hope they take their time. It will not be an easy or quick
conversion. It could take several years," he said.
Furthermore, major infrastructure players such as Microsoft,
IBM, and Oracle will be aided by the trend of enterprises moving
away from departmental web conferencing purchasing decisions to
standardise on a broader collaboration toolset that includes online
meeting functionality, according to analysts.
IBM Global Services last year began offering Lotus IM and web
conferencing as a hosted service, and will tie that service more
closely to its premise-based software, according to Kevin McLellan,
marketing manager of Workplace collaboration products at IBM
Lotus.
"We've seen the need from our customers to have flexibility in
how you acquire that capability," McLellan said.
Oracle rounded out its Collaboration Suite with internet meeting
capabilities. WebEx - the sector's established market leader - will
need to expand the range of applications it runs on its global
MediaTone Network to stay competitive with the larger collaboration
platforms, Meta Group's Gotta said.
Microsoft will add presence awareness and IM capabilities to the
Live Meeting environment, allowing meeting participants to see the
availability status of other participants. The company also has
plans in place for its incremental integration with enterprise
infrastructure such as Exchange, directory services, and
development environments in the future.
Cathleen Moore writes for InfoWorld