Microsoft Goes Live With Microsoft Office Live Meeting

Sept. 15 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Microsoft today announced the release of a new service called Microsoft Office Live Meeting, an online collaboration and Web conferencing service that empowers business people to conduct real-time, interactive presentations and meetings over the Internet. Live Meeting is the first fully hosted service within the new Microsoft Office System, which is scheduled to launch next month and is delivered by PlaceWare Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft. Live Meeting is a major upgrade to PlaceWare's Conference Center and offers an easy and intuitive Windows-based interface with powerful new presentation, scheduling and administration features.

Live Meeting offers a native-based desktop console that follows familiar conventions of Windows-based software, making it easy to learn and use, and provides more flexible controls for meeting presenters. The new service also delivers rich, full-screen viewing options for meeting participants and feedback tools such as chat and a question/answer manager to make online meetings more engaging and productive. Subscribers also receive powerful scheduling and administration tools, and the option of customizing the service to include their own branding.

"Honeywell has been using the Live Meeting service for four years around the globe to conduct training, meetings and events, and it has steadily increased our productivity," said Lee Allen, manager of e-business operations at Honeywell. "Live Meeting has enabled broader, more timely participation of employees, customers and business partners in these meetings and events. That participation, in turn, has helped Honeywell become more agile and better equipped to make smarter, faster decisions. We've been very satisfied with PlaceWare's quick response to include the product features and functionality we need, and we're looking forward to the newest version of Live Meeting because it more easily accommodates the various desktop platforms we support."

Live Meeting is the first fully hosted service from the new Microsoft Office System, which helps highlight how dramatically different the new Microsoft Office System will be from its well-known predecessor, the Microsoft Office software suite. Live Meeting is a great solution for companies that want to conduct virtual meetings and online events to better communicate and collaborate with geographically dispersed employees, partners, customers and other audiences. The service is a natural fit with Microsoft Office because Office documents are the most frequently shared content in online meetings, and the new Microsoft Office System is specifically designed to better connect people, information and business processes across organizations.

"The Microsoft Office System goal is to connect people with each other and valuable information quickly, easily and cost-effectively. Live Meeting is a wonderful example of a service that brings people together live in small collaboration sessions, across their company or around the world. It helps business people share information, learn from each other and work together without the hassle, cost and delay required by travel," said Anoop Gupta, corporate vice president of the Real-Time Collaboration Business Unit at Microsoft. "Savvy companies are embracing the benefits of Web conferencing, and IDC predicts 250 million people will be using Web conferencing applications by 2007. Microsoft will serve this growing space with its Live Meeting service and add unique real-time collaboration benefits to the new Microsoft Office System to help information workers around the world be more successful and productive."

"Microsoft's positioning of an upgraded conferencing service -- formerly known as PlaceWare Conference Center -- as an extension to its new Office System will encourage customers to create their own custom blends of insourced, outsourced, real-time and non-real-time collaboration," said Mark Levitt, vice president for Collaborative Computing at IDC, a leading provider of global IT research and advice. "End users will be more likely to collaborate successfully when they have access to a palette of various collaborative tools that are flexible enough to meet diverse and changing business needs."

Among its many new features, Live Meeting makes online meetings more engaging and productive through the following:

• Completely redesigned interfaces for more convenient session scheduling, meeting attendance, administrative functions and report generation
• Simplified navigation so participants can more easily perform tasks related to managing meetings and recordings
• Improved flexibility in presenting content shown, such as full-screen views, movable annotations, and the ability to rename and reorder slides
• Additional presenter tools to better manage meeting participant interactivity and meeting content
• Keyboard shortcuts that reduce the time it takes to perform routine tasks such as displaying additional meeting information, hiding and restoring control panels, and advancing through slides

Microsoft also has enhanced the Live Meeting service infrastructure to take advantage of advanced clustering and load balancing technology.

Pricing and Availability
Microsoft Office Live Meeting service will be available to customers beginning Sept. 15. Current PlaceWare customers will be upgraded at no extra cost as part of their service subscription. Despite the expansive upgrades included in Live Meeting, pricing has not changed and includes two basic packages: Presenter and Premier Editions. The Presenter Edition offers presentation tools, persistent content (ongoing meetings), attendance reporting and application viewing. The Premier Edition extends the Presenter Edition by adding application sharing, printing and handouts, recordings, and Outlook scheduling. Pricing and licensing options are available through PlaceWare.

Source: Microsoft Corp.