The Webinar Blog

An Early Look At Citrix GoToWebinar

It took a week and a half because of scheduling conflicts and illness, but I finally got a look at the late Beta version of Citrix's GoToWebinar (first reported here on June 15). A big thank you to Sean at Citrix, my conduit to the secrets from the vault. The product is supposed to be released at the end of this week or beginning of next week, so I should have seen something pretty darned close to the shipping version. Still, any specifics related here are subject to change and I accept full responsibility for any inaccuracies in my description.

GoToWebinar is really a souped up version of Citrix's standard GoToMeeting product with additional features to support formalized public events. One important thing they have done in the new release of GoToMeeting to enable wider applicability is to let attendees view events from Macintosh computers. You still need a Windows operating system to present however.

GoToMeeting does not support the concept of uploaded files or documents. Everything is run as an application share from the presenter's desktop. While this eliminates problems associated with misconversion of slides and loss of transitions and animations in PowerPoint shows, it decreases scaling and caching that can potentially help the viewing experience.

Citrix assumes all audio communications will be conducted over the telephone. There is no accommodation for sound over a viewer's computer speakers. This makes sense for collaborative meetings, but audience members watching webinars and webcasts these days often like the option of listening via computer. To ease the burden, Citrix has partnered with BT Conferencing to provide an introductory chunk of teleconferencing minutes (roughly enough for one good sized event with 100 people listening for one hour).

The audio aspects of the overall webinar solution package are the most troubling for me. If you use BT Conferencing, you can automatically record your audio and web presentation together. But if you use another teleconferencing provider you have to hook up a hardware patch cable to your telephone and siphon off the sound to your PC as a digitized stream to be meshed with the video portion (I didn't get full details on the methodology and haven't tried it). WebEx has the same patch box recording limitation and it always bugs me when I have to go through the wiring and volume adjustment hassle.

The use of an audio conferencing partner that charges per minute of usage also undercuts Citrix's popular flat fee pricing model. GoToMeeting has always been licensed on an unlimited usage basis (within predefined maximums of number of attendees per event and number of licensed meeting hosts for a company). GoToWebinar will be priced in the same way (they haven't announced license costs yet). But you still have a variable cost thrown into your budget calculations because of the required audio side of things.

Those are the negatives up front. Offsetting them are some very nice positives.

GoToWebinar uses a dashboard strip of mini windows showing various statistics and functions for the webinar organizer and presenters. You can open and close individual functional windows and drag them around your desktop to match your own UI preferences. The audience statistics window offers some useful and unusual capabilities. You can see not only how many people are currently in attendance, but how many joined and then left the meeting. You can also see an instantaneous indication of how many people have shifted the window focus away from the GoToWebinar viewing frame (to answer emails, play Solitaire, or surf the Web?). This lets a presenter get a rough idea of whether s/he is holding the audience, allowing some kind of interactive trick to pull them back.

Audience members can also set little smiley or frowny faces as mood indicators. Admittedly, I don't like these quite as much as specific feedback indicators such as Speak Louder, Slow Down, and Speed Up, but it's nice to have something that gives attendees a perceived voice in how they are being treated.

Polls allow both single answer and multiple answer questions (eg: "Pick all that apply'). They show results as percentages without displaying the raw number of votes (useful when your total attendance isn't something you want to advertise!). One limitation here is that questions are limited to a maximum of five possible answers, and I've run into situations where I've wanted more options than that. There is also a Survey feature that lets you assemble a collection of questions with answers allowed in a 1-5 scale, short text responses, or longer essay responses (as well as multiple choice). Surveys are designed to be distributed after an event, rather than as an interactive feature in the middle of a presentation.

GoToWebinar really impressed me with its powerful and easy to use setup of registration and invitations. Each event gets the standard factual information such as date/time, title, and description. But then you can create both a registration page and HTML email invitations that use your own uploaded graphics (logos, images, speaker photographs), with a choice of predefined layouts, color selections, etc. It struck me as an excellent balance of flexibility and easy management. You can copy an existing event to reuse a template you have already established.

GoToWebinar also has the concept of a "waiting room", which is nothing more than a static slide that is automatically displayed before your event starts. Attendees see this when they log in early. You can use more sample layouts and upload your desired logos, graphics, and speaker information, along with arbitrary text information. It's a nice bit of unexpected functionality.

Registration pages include standard demographic fields that can be included or omitted, and you can add your own. Registrants can be automatically added to the attendee list or held for manual approval. You can also push registrants to a URL of your choice after they sign up, which might be useful for doing payment processing through an external system or simply for leading registrants to your corporate website.

Question and Answer features are fairly simple. You can answer a typed question privately or for the entire group to see. Attendee questions can be set for viewing by all or only by presenters. There is no facility to mark questions for later followup.

Recordings are stored in a proprietary Citrix format that can be converted to a standard WMA Windows Media file. In another nice cost-saving convenience, Citrix will host an event recording on their site for one year at no extra charge. The recording file is also available at no charge for download in case you want to host it on your own server or distribute it via email or CD.

Citrix says that GoToWebinar can handle audience sizes of up to one thousand.

The flexible organization and setup features, the general ease of use, and the consistency of interfaces between GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar make the pair a strong contender for general corporate use. If Citrix comes through with cut-throat unlimited usage pricing (a traditional strong point of theirs), the combo is poised for some serious success.

I'll try to do a follow-up report after I've had a chance to use the real product in a real setting, and we'll see how the reality matches the promise.

Technorati Tags: Citrix, GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, web conference, web conferencing, webcast, webcasting, webinar

Microsoft's Unified Communication Roadmap

I just finished watching Microsoft's presentation on their 12-month roadmap for Unified Communications. There was precious little emphasis or news about Microsoft Office Live Meeting, or the ways it will compare and contrast with Office Communicator 2007, which will also boast some web conferencing capabilities.

They did announce that enhancements for Live Meeting are focused on making it better for e-Learning, simplifying deployment, improving IP audio, and adding support for rich media such as video streams and Flash movies. They also reinforced its prominence as a key part of the Unified Communications product suite triumvirate along with Office Communications Server 2007 and Office Commnunicator 2007. The big availability push for the suite in general (not necessarily applicable to a Live Meeting individual version release) is mid-year in 2007. That's a long time from now in software terms, so I hope they are planning to do some interim releases on Live Meeting in the meantime.

That's our primary focus in this forum, although there was plenty of other stuff covered in the close to 2-hour presentation. Many other journalists will be reporting on the main integrated communications philosophy. The vision is not new... allow easy integration of voice communication with instant messaging, web conferencing, email, and file sharing. Microsoft is putting a big emphasis on "presence" based software. The idea is to give people an identity in a master directory that allows contact with them through whatever channel is most appropriate or available at the time with a simple name lookup tied to their availability status. No remembering multiple screen names, email addresses, and telephone numbers.

One product they demonstrated (also planned for mid-2007 availability) is called Microsoft Office RoundTable. This is an interesting hardware/software combo that acts as a webcam on steroids for use in web meetings. The camera sits in the middle of the room on a stalk and has a 360-degree field of vision. It transforms the image of the people in the room into a panoramic strip picture showing them all sitting in a line. When a person begins speaking, the camera focuses on the speaker for a closeup image in the speaker video window. Very cute. Of course there are unavoidable questions of practicality in my mind (unasked and unanswered in their demo, but after all, this is still a pre-release concept demo!). If you have a long rectangular table, how does the panoramic assembly account for the different apparent size and focus range on the people closer and farther from the lens? What happens to the automatic speaker select function when people's voices overlap? There was one point in their demo where the camera seemed fixated on a potted palm in a corner of the room, which may have been the strongest reflection point of the speakerphone audio when the person on the other end of the line was speaking.

On a side note, I have to wonder what the marketing folks were smoking when deciding on their demo subject. They went into a long and involved sample meeting scenario with a group trying to decide on what food to order for lunch... Thai or pizza. They even mentioned Round Table pizza by name to get the clever tie-in, although I'd be interested in whether they worked out usage agreements with the existing trademarked product name before assigning it to their own product.

As far as the presentation itself went, it was clearly designed primarily for the local in-room audience and secondarily for the web viewing audience. I have my display set to 1280x1024 resolution with full 32-bit color display. Images still seemed fuzzy and hard to read. Screen shots were impossible to interpret. I am on a cable modem broadband connection and I had some trouble with buffering the stream, getting some stops and starts in the presentation.

Here are some other random presentation and speaking points that came to mind as I watched:

- They had a nice scrolling slideshow running while waiting for the main event to begin. It included some polling questions, followed by summary results and comments. But there was no indication of the source of the results. Whenever you show summary statistics you owe it to the audience to tell them who is represented in the sample set and when it was done.

- The main speaker (Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft's Business Division) did a good job of keeping his voice animated and speaking to the crowd. He overused "I thought" and "We thought" as a preface to concepts. A speaker should be as declarative as possible.

- Both Jeff and co-presenter Anoop Gupta used the word "seamlessly" about once every 30 seconds. This is the latest overused buzzword in the tech industry and it needs to be hunted down and stomped out of existence. You show me where the possibility for "seams" lies first... Then I'll let you tell me how you do it seamlessly instead.

- Comedy is best left to professional comedians, acting to professional actors, script writing to professional script writers. We are an incredibly sophisticated society when it comes to consuming professional entertainment. Our expectations are very high because of constant exposure to television shows, movies, commercials, and other intricately produced entertainment products. Every time the Microsoft team launched into a live acted out scenario featuring cheesy laugh lines, wooden actors, and theatrics (eg: a woman sitting in a chair pretending to drive a car with her arms up in front of her moving an imaginary steering wheel back and forth), things slowed to a painful crawl. Say what you have to say. You can do it!

- Watch out for overly complex demo scenarios or those that emphasize story line over the takeaway points for the audience. The team spent so long discussing the merits of Thai food versus pizza that the fact of the virtual meeting and the RoundTable camera was almost lost. The audience was led to care about the resolution of the silly demo argument instead of the technology being used to solve it.

So there it is. I was hoping for more on the Live Meeting front, but it looks like we'll just have to wait for the next release as usual before seeing any specifics.

Technorati Tags: collaboration, Live Meeting, Microsoft, Microsoft RoundTable, Unified Communications, videoconferencing, web conference, web conferencing

New WebEx Rewards Program

A brief news blurb by COLLOQUY posted online Friday (available by registering for a free subscription) indicates that WebEx is starting a new rewards program for pay-per-use customers. I can't find a distributed press release about this online and I can't find any news on the WebEx website, so for now, the story is unverified. Maybe COLLOQUY got an advance press release notification and broke the story before the embargo date. Maybe not. I have no idea.

They say that program participants earn reward points for total attendee meeting minutes in each hosted pay-per-use meeting. Reward points can be redeemed for rewards from an online catalog. There is also supposed to be a bonus setup for meetings lasting longer than 30 minutes. Hosts can do a virtual "spin 'n win" for a bonus gift from the catalog.

The program is stated to be good until the end of 2006 for meetings held from now through the end of November.

This would be an interesting tactic for increasing market share and incenting customers to hold more meetings with more attendees for longer durations. Since WebEx typically charges pay-per-use customers based on number of attendees times length of meeting, it makes good business sense to drive up those figures.

Technorati Tags: COLLOQUY, web conferencing, WebEx, webinar

New teamslide release hits the streets

Patrick in Germany sent an email alerting me to the release of teamslide 1.8. I talked about the initial release of the product two months ago. That's a pretty short timespan for a second version to come out. Back in my software development days, I would have done it for one of two reasons. Either the software was buggy as hell when I released it and we had to fix a lot of things quickly, or Marketing had forced us to release a product on a predetermined date, forcing us to omit features that weren't quite ready for prime time. I'm guessing it was the latter scenario with teamslide, as they have added things that seem like natural inclusions for the product and were probably part of the development plan from the beginning.

The software is now integrated with Skype VOIP computer telephony. You can click on a participant name and initiate a Skype call and you can send a presentation invitation as a Skype instant message. This is the second low-cost conferencing product I have played with this week that integrates with Skype for audio communications (the other was Convenos). Skype must be happy that the web vendors are jumping on the bandwagon.

The second new feature is the ability to push an internet URL to participants. They can open the address in a new browser window. It doesn't look like there is any "follow me" or "watch me" functionality once they open the address... they are completely independent in their interactions with the web site. This is a nice convenience feature, especially if you put together surveys, feedback pages, or other interactivity boosters on the web page.

The most important new feature is the ability to place annotations on the slide you are presenting. You can either click-place a pointer on the screen or you can draw a rectangle around an arbitrary region on the slide. I'm a big fan of annotations on PowerPoint slides. It helps focus your audience's attention where you want it to be. The new implementation is very simple... you don't get choices of line color, thickness, or style. But it serves the purpose.

I'm always interested in seeing products develop. Good for you, telepark!

Technorati Tags: PowerPoint, teamslide, telepark, web conferencing

CTC Wednesday sessions

I attended a couple of afternoon sessions before flying home today. One session talked about basic issues in implementing the virtual workforce. I was a bit frustrated because the two speakers, both associated with consulting businesses in the collaborative arena and both with backgrounds in formal psychology, presented facts and sound bites without ever expressing a point of view. It must be significant that while virtual work arrangements are growing at many companies, HP has scrapped their home-worker program and brought their employees back into a traditional office environment. Yet this was briefly mentioned as a throwaway factoid and never discussed again.

But on a more positive note, there were some ideas that definitely resonated. David Coleman pointed out that most new users of conferencing products come to the table with a specific problem or application and don't think about growth and additional potential uses of the technology. As a matter of fact, it's usually a business-side inquiry that doesn't take technology into account at all. They want a fast magic bullet solution to the immediate problem. I would agree with this scenario in many cases I have seen. David said the business unit will typically approach the purchase decision with two clear criteria... has a direct competitor in the same industry already validated the product by using it for the same purpose under consideration (the famous "evaluation by three customer references" case)? And how cheap is it? This is a pity, as it fosters point solutions in the purchasing company that may compete with each other, it eliminates opportunities for enterprise cost savings through economies of scale, and it buries proactive planning for innovative use ("We'll use it for this one meeting and then shelve the software").

David also presented an intriguing idea that software products are now starting to be "designed" by the customer instead of the vendor. Vendors can offer multiple modules and options that can be purchased, configured, and integrated in unique ways by different customers. Macromedia Breeze springs to my mind with its functional pods that can be added, deleted, moved and resized by each customer to form a unique graphical user interface suited to their needs and preferences.

Jim Ware pointed out that when most people think about technologies, they tend to assume in "straight lines." The assumption that things will keep going in the direction you currently perceive them is common and almost invariably wrong. Early technology introductions may be lacking in features, or sophistication, or real world applicability. So people assume they will stay marginalized. Then if the technical adoption starts to grow, people assume it will keep growing, ignoring an inevitable maturity and saturation level-off. Once that happens, people assume there is no room for innovation and growth in that space (until the original vendor or a competitor starts the cycle again).

The second session was much more technically oriented, with implementation managers from Genzyme, Lehman Brothers, and Boston University talking about their experiences bringing virtual communications to the work force. Both of the first two companies mentioned above were spurred directly and tragically to implement more remote communications, work arrangements, and facility relocations by the events of September 11, 2001. Genzyme saw a tremendous increase in usage of virtual communications when they moved their primary platform from conference rooms with video conference setups down to PC-based web conferencing (Genzyme happened to use WebEx). The manager from Lehman was much more concerned with the ability to deliver high-end professional video communications with high reliability and quality. He was not a big fan of webcams and PC-based web conferencing, instead opting for professional video production studios onsite. Different solutions for different purposes (and I would venture to guess, very different budgets!)

That's about it for my coverage of this year's conference. I found it an interesting and valuable look at both the technology and applications of unified communications. Vendors both large and small are riding the combined collaboration wave and bringing together telephone communications, web conferencing, data sharing, and workforce management. I hope you got a little sense from these notes of some of the action at the show.

Technorati Tags: collaboration, collaborative technologies conference, Unified Communications, videoconferencing, web conferencing

A Few More CTC Exhibitors

I had a chance to talk to the Cisco product marketing manager for their Unified Communications group. Mike Fratesi took me through their web conferencing components as part of the larger unified communications product set. Cisco is a strong believer in the integrated voice/data/web technology vision. They have some very fancy telephone presence detection using their dedicated installed hardware. The web conferencing piece is primarily targeted at internal collaborative meetings rather than external formal webinars. For instance, they don't support an integrated event registration facility. The software itself comes in two flavors. Cisco MeetingPlace Enterprise has plugins to permit easy group scheduling from enterprise calendaring programs like Outlook. It also ties in to telephone presence and audio conferencing through Cisco's voice networking. MeetingPlace Express is their "simple, powerful conferencing" solution, using Flash technology for install-free browser based conferences. That sounds good, and when Mike started showing me the interface I suddenly realized it was Macromedia Breeze! Cisco OEM'd the software, added some bells and whistles for integration with their networking products and took out the registration stuff. So you get all the standard Breeze functionality inside a web conference, using the Macromedia configurable "pods."

Another Michael collared me between sessions. Michael Rozlog is VP of Product Management for Convenos. Convenos is a web conferencing vendor that announced a new pricing model while they were at the show, allowing companies to hold unlimited meetings for the ridiculously low price of $30/month or $300/year. That has its limitations, of course. The price is for one named host (presenter) with audience sizes of no more than 25 people per event. There is higher pricing for their Convenos Meeting Center Professional Edition, which supports audience sizes of 99 or less. That's still not enough capacity to handle big outbound public events like marketing presentations or public communications, so we are talking about an obvious focus on the smaller group meeting space. The software also depends on Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer, so it's not going to be the choice for presentations to the world at large where you can't guarantee your participants' work platforms.

I had a great time tossing ideas back and forth with Michael about the differences in communication and interaction styles that occur in a web conference as opposed to a live or telephone meeting. He said something very interesting and unusual for a product vendor in this area... He told me he was frustrated with how little the fundamentals of web conferencing had evolved since the earliest days of Placeware and WebEx. Sure, bandwidth and connection speeds have increased, allowing more rich content. Sure, companies have improved features like annotation, Q&A, and polling. But they are all incremental evolutionary changes. Where's the big innovation that wows people with a revolutionary new piece of functionality?

I certainly don't know the answer to the question. Software and technology pundits never guess about application usage properly until some clever entrepreneur bakes up a combination of vision, execution, and business savvy to bring it to an unsuspecting public. I still remember when personal computers started gaining notice and the prevailing wisdom was that home users would want them for balancing their checkbooks. Who was talking about global instantaneous search crawling on a worldwide network of web pages and blogs? Who was foreseeing an entire generation addicted to instant messaging and email (spawning a new vocabulary and phonetically abbreviated language that would have floored the old Western Union telegram authors)?

I'm going to keep my eye on Convenos and see whether Michael's interest in innovation can translate into new Wow technology offerings.

Technorati Tags: Cisco, collaboration, collaborative technologies conference, Convenos, ctc2006, Macromedia, Unified Communications, web conferencing

CTC Impressions - Part III

Just to break things up in this ever-expanding series from the CTC, here are a few random thoughts:

1. The Boston Metro could use some better ventilation in their big underground transfer stations. The heat and humidity were overwhelming at Government Center and Park St. The underground buses on the new Silver Line extension to the south are great!


2. My Netgear Travel Wireless router is working like a champ. Bed and outlet on one side of my hotel room, desk and hardwired Ethernet connection on the other. I'm comfortably typing this while sitting in bed, using my own instantaneous room-sized personal wireless network. I love technology that turns on and works!


3. The Similans on First Street in Cambridge is a very nice Thai restaurant with one of the most extensive menus I have found for this cuisine.

Back to the show...

Leverage Software had an interesting add-on to the online (or live) event world. Their EventConnect product lets you set up an online community of attendees who can enter information about themselves, their interests, and their desired networking contacts. You can collect demographic and usage information and let your users carry on discussions on collaborative boards and forums. A nice way to keep the interest level up both before and after your event!

"Video is the new black" -- Everybody was pushing live video in web conferencing. I saw booth after booth featuring poor quality webcam images of conference participants. You know my opinions on the subject if you've been reading for a while. I say that video is a fine addition to a webcast or web conference. IF you have professional cameras, lighting, makeup, and background. Shooting yourself with a cheap webcam in your messy cubicle with a cheesy headphone on does not inspire audience confidence in your professional savoir faire. But then again, I'm a crotchety old timer who still believes that uncompressed music sounds better than an MP3 played through an iPod! I did find one vendor who quietly admitted that while all their prospects asked about and demanded video "talking head' capabilities, hardly any of them ever ended up using it. Shhh... don't tell anybody!

My choice for winner in the video web conferencing sweepstakes was Arel Communications and Software. They were showing off an add in for Microsoft Office Live Meeting that made live speaker video more efficient and manageable. They could display anything up to 16 participant videos at one time and had some serious compression algorithms to make the videos look good in low bandwidth situations.

I'll finish up with some final thoughts tomorrow.

Technorati Tags: Arel Communications, collaboration, ctc2006, collaborative technologies conference, Leverage Software, Live Meeting, videoconferencing, web conferencing, webcast

CTC Impressions - Part II

Oh, so much more to relate for the second half of the day at the Collaborative Technologies Conference. First things first... a big apology to Centra from Saba for intimating that they weren't present at the conference. I didn't see them at first because they were sharing a booth under the EMC² logo. I talked to Gary Lombardo, the Sr. Product Marketing Manager for the Centra product. He played up the EMC Documentum partnership and said that Centra was the only web conferencing product to be EMC certified under the Designed For Documentum certification program (exclusivity not independently verified by yours truly, but then again, I certainly don't know of any others with the certification!). Saba has integrated Centra with the EMC eRoom product to enable users to create conferences from the eRoom interface and to use eRoom resources in the conference. While Centra is still a valid web conferencing product for general use, Saba is concentrating on positioning it for the e-Learning market.

I briefly mentioned Facilitate.com in my last post, saying that they were leading a session about running effective live face to face meetings. I had a chance to speak with Danuta McCall from Facilitate, who shared their vision and their methodology for structuring brainstorming sessions, structured agendas, and collaborative teamwork in meeting scenarios. They have a web-based software product that helps companies create structured agendas with collaborative questionnaires, opinion polls, and comment aggregators. They claim that using this kind of approach not only encourages participation and creativity, but shortens average meeting lengths (and I'm all for that!). Danuta's enthusiasm was infectious, but I wanted to know how their software could fit in with a web conferencing world. She came back with a quotable bon mot: "A bad meeting run as a web conference is still a bad meeting." She pointed out that since their software for interactive collaboration runs on the web, any web conferencing product that can push a web page would be suitable for driving to that point of the meeting. Say you start out with an informational presentation or a proposal, then start a brainstorming session to get feedback and see how the basics can be improved. Makes sense to me and using something built for the task has got to be more efficient than a generic Chat log in a web conferencing product.

Speaking of web conferencing products, I got back to Interwise and chatted with director of product marketing Bob Pierce. We went through so much that I'll probably need to do a focus piece on Interwise in a future post. The company is really pushing the flat fee/unlimited usage pricing model for web conferencing. They have their own international network of servers for hosted conferencing (the Interwise Global Expressway). Unlike some other vendors, they work all conferencing options (collaborative group meetings, one-to-many webinars, e-Learning sessions) from a single product, rather than selling a suite of specialized applications. They are also one of the increasingly common vendors offering integrated web presentation and audio (VOIP and/or telephone) through their own audio network.

This entry is getting too long for convenient one-bite consumption. Check out the next entry for more news from the show floor.

Technorati Tags: Centra, collaboration, ctc2006, collaborative technologies conference, Facilitate.com, Saba, Interwise, web conference, web conferencing, webcasting, webinar

CTC Initial Impressions

Greetings from the Collaborative Technologies Conference in Boston. After a ridiculously early morning flight, I've surveyed the action after half a day and bring you the early word.

A conference organizer told me they were estimating 700-800 person attendance, but I have to say that my eyeball estimate would be half that many. Still, it's hard to do an accurate count and I have no reason to accuse them of prevarication.

Sessions are a varied mix of high-level concept presentations ("The Social Life of Learning in the Networked Age", "Compliance and Collaboration: Did you cross your Ts and dot your Is?") and specifics dealing with software and applications ("Case Studies in Collaborative Technology for Education", "Microsoft vs. Lotus: Comparative Analysis"). Kudos to the brave people at Mindjet and Facilitate.com for daring to throw in a session about running effective face-to-face meetings. You mean people still do that?!?  :)

The demo pavilion has a wide mix of companies. Big names include Microsoft, Cisco, Nortel Networks, and IBM. But there are quite a few up 'n comers I saw for the first time. Collaborative technologies covers a range of interests, and companies are showing off everything from content management, workflow, email, video conferencing, calendaring, and multi-person user interfaces to larger sized web conferencing and webinar solutions.

SMART Board has two electronic whiteboards on easels set up across the room from each other. You can draw on one with an electronic marker pen and have the information show up simultaneously on the other. But an even cooler user interface is being demonstrated by a guy from Mitsubishi Electronic Labs. Sitting over in a corner, he has a laptop hooked up to a small video projector mounted vertically on a pole. It is projecting the screen contents down onto a horizontal table. Four small stools are set around the table. If you sit on a stool, a pressure pad registers your presence and you can start drawing with your fingers on the screen image on the table. Multiple people can touch the image at once and draw rectangles around items, highlight others, or make freehand annotations. The display software keeps the annotations separate and color coded, even when two people overlap on their markings. It is a gas to watch and play with. The technology is just moving from prototype to commercial application and needs to be scaled for volume and realistic pricing. Right now it's over $10K for a setup, not counting computer or projector. The easiest applications I could think of to use this were military commanders surveying a battlefield and marketing coordinated battle plans, or surgeons collaborating on an MRI image or X-Ray and deciding on their surgical strategy.

Convoq is showing off their newly announced integration with Salesforce.com, where you can pull up a Salesforce contact name and immediately start a conferencing session with that person. They also have a new app called PitchASAP that lets external visitors to a website push a button and start a conference with a rep. It turns the activation of a conference over to the customer and gives them the power to be proactive.

I was fascinated by Trumba Corporation's Trumba Calendar platform. It lets a company organize large lists of events (internal meetings, external conferences, web events) so that users can pick through the list and download reminders into their personal calendars.

No presence from most of the big name web seminar software vendors. Microsoft was the exception, showing off Live Meeting in conjunction with its Unified Communications products and vision. Adobe is also here with its Macromedia Breeze acquisition. And as mentioned earlier, Convoq has its ASAP lineup on display. I also saw that Interwise has a booth, but I haven't had a chance to talk to them yet. I'll get to them later. But no WebEx, Raindance, Centra, Citrix, iLinc, Vcall, ON24, etc. I think these companies should work on making one-to-many web conferences part of the collaborative technologies perception. Collaborating with one's customers and employees in group sessions is just as valid a use of the terminology as small brainstorming sessions. There aren't many forums that include web seminar technology as a featured subject, so I'm surprised these vendors don't take advantage of their few opportunities.

Premiere Global Services is here and took me through a nice discussion of their offerings in the web conferencing world. I have used Premiere on many occasions handling the telephone audio side of a webinar while I used a dedicated web technology for the visuals. They have a good professional setup. They told me that they recently announced a partnership with Adobe to add Breeze to their lineup of resold web conferencing software. So you can set up an integrated telephone/web conference using WebEx, Live Meeting, or Breeze and get a single invoice through Premiere. According to Stacy, their marketing manager, they are the only audio provider to have a complete integrated audio partnership with Breeze so you can manage call-in participants through the web interface. They also have an in-house solution called Netspoke, which is designed for smaller meetings and less complex needs. It is designed for ease of use and a short learning curve when a customer doesn't want to get into the intricacies of the third-party vendor packages.

That's enough for a first blush overview. Time to get back and do some more digging.

Technorati Tags: collaboration, ctc2006, collaborative technologies conference, Convoq, Macromedia, premiere global, Netspoke, Trumba, Unified Communications, Unified Communications Group, web conferencing, webinar

Microsoft To Preview Unified Communications Concept

On the same day that Citrix went crazy with three press releases on a new webinar product offering, Microsoft quietly sent out some emails announcing a strategy and roadmap webinar for their new Unified Communications platform.

Microsoft will be using its Live Meeting webinar software to give the big picture and strategic view of its plans for integrating enterprise communications with email, instant messaging, voice, data, and video.

The presentation features some high ranking titles in the responsible divisions: The president of the Microsoft Business Division, the Corporate VP of the Unified Communications Group, and the Corporate VP of the RTC Product Group.

The webinar is scheduled for Monday, June 26 at 9:30am Pacific / 12:30pm Eastern. You can sign up at this page.

 

Technorati Tags: Live Communications Server, Live Meeting, Microsoft, Unified Communications, web conferencing, webinar