Microsoft RoundTable + Office Live Meeting 2007

I was onsite at a client yesterday and presented to a large group of business and IT staff on the topic of social computing. While many people were in the room - there was greater attendance virtually with several other locations participating in the 4 hour session via Microsoft Office RoundTable and Live Meeting 2007.

I have to say that as a presenter, I was impressed with the experience delivered by the combination of RoundTable and Live Meeting 2007. Feedback from other people participating in the session was equally positive. The audio quality from RoundTable was perceived to be better than the previous conferencing option used. The panoramic video display that RoundTable delivers within the Live Meeting console also received positive comments. The tracking capability of RoundTable was also very good - as people conversed or moved about, the RoundTable system tracked changes in speaker and their location. As I wandered back and forth in front of the room (for instance, to point out certain items on a slide), the system consistently found me in a flawless manner.  The IT folks told me that RoundTable installed without a problem and the integration with MOLM 2007 was seamless.

I expect RoundTable (with its price point) to have a significant impact on how people think about group conferencing (e.g., bridging co-located groups with remote groups). It would be nice to see RoundTable integrated with other web conferencing tools however - it's nice (and expected) to see the level of integration with Live Meeting 2007 but I would like to see interoperability with other tools as well (e.g., IBM Lotus Sametime or Adobe Connect or Cisco Latitude). 

Comments

[Pyramus]

Very interesting article. Thanks for sharing.

[online meeting reviews]

It's an good application, they do offer low cost solutions for up to 5 users and up to 10 users for the small business. But I think Goto and Meetmenow have them beat.

[Midlife Crisis]

Did you see the roundtable of this year ?