April 26, 2005
Viewpoint: Microsoft's Jeff Raikes On Real-Time Collaboration
Satisfying Virtual Meeting Needs
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We also made big advances toward satisfying virtual meeting needs with the 2005 release of Microsoft Office Live Meeting. During our launch event, I helped demonstrate these enhanced capabilities via a live collaboration session involving the creative minds behind NBC's hit reality series "The Apprentice." The show's co-creator and executive producer, Mark Burnett, sat with me in Los Angeles while participants from past seasons joined the Live Meeting session from Chicago and New York, and two fellow Microsoft Office executives participated from London and San Francisco. Mark had a great way of describing Live Meeting: instead of giving a presentation in one room with 200 people, you can give a presentation in 200 rooms with 200 people each, and allow everyone to participate.
Live Meeting means that presentations scale from huge auditoriums to a single PC. Anyone with a PC connected to the internet can participate in a Live Meeting, whether at the office at his or her desk, in a conference room, or any other location with access. This means you can easily scale to a larger audience without worrying about the venue, travel, etc.
Live Meeting is used extensively within Microsoft and it provided immediate returns. At Microsoft in FY04, Live Meeting replaced 1 in 5 business trips and saved the company over $40 million U.S.; in FY05, that savings is expected to top $70 million. Live Meeting helps the company communicate to more people with less effort, time and cost.
I, personally, have used Live Meeting with people on my staff even when only a few of us are involved " saving the time it takes to book a meeting room or travel between buildings. I can launch it easily from any tool that supports "presence" — which happens to be most of the Microsoft Office System tools. I can quickly review presentations or other documents through Live Meeting's support for drag-and-drop sharing of other Microsoft applications like Excel, Word and Visio.
Additionally, more effortless and cost-effective audio controls help users better focus on meeting content. Audio Conference Call Controls is an integrated audio tool that enables participants to be called directly at their desk phone to join a meeting and allows presenters to mute, un-mute and disconnect participants from MCI, BT and InterCall services. With the current phone interface, these functions are often hidden or difficult to use " because of this, most people do not even use the advanced functions of their phone systems today. As an alternative to telephone audio conferencing, customers can reduce audio-related costs with Internet Audio Broadcast. Audio is streamed over the Internet using voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), so meeting participants need only the speakers on their PC to join in.
All of these modes of communication are now beginning to work together. Today, I can receive an e-mail, then IM the person who sent it, start a video call, or launch a live meeting if needed - all within the context of the application that I am working in. Then, with a click, I can add others to the Live Meeting or conversation and launch a conference call by having my service contact the participants automatically. The ability to easily jump to whichever communication mode makes sense takes the focus off how you communicate — letting you easily switch between the modes that make sense — and instead focus on what you communicate.
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