Office Live Meeting 2007: Only Large Enterprises Need Apply?

Interesting article below. I believe Microsoft is focusing more on the large enterprise with Office Live Meeting 2007 where the client can be distributed using the admin toolkit as part of normal software distribution and update processes (and maintained using the Intranet Portal). Microsoft is heavily playing the UC card by positioning Live Meeting, RoundTable and OCS as synergistic and part of a platform approach - the price to that effort of course is the uptake of Live Meeting in the consumer space and for external audiences (where large downloads as described below are intolerable for many meeting participants). Cisco/WebEx still reigns as the market leader overall - especially in the SMB space, with other vendors (e.g., Adobe, Citrix and Web Dialogs to some extent) also commonly cited during my client interactions). 

It turns out that while David Chao's article was correct about the size of the Microsoft Live Meeting client download, that is only part of the story. The Live Meeting installation information and product website recommends using the full client if possible, for complete functionality. That is indeed a 15MB download, with an installation disk space requirement of 125MB! The installation requires Microsoft Windows, as the EXE and DLL components are written only for a Windows operating system.

But there is an alternative. Live Meeting allows the use of "Meeting Web Access" (MWA), which lets you run the service from a web browser as a Java applet. The system requirements page lists supported platforms as Internet Explorer on Windows, Firefox on Windows (but only XP... not Vista!), Safari on Mac OS, and Firefox on Solaris. I called tech support and asked about Unix and Linux operating systems. The rep told me that those platforms may or may not work and they are not tested or supported. (By the way, Microsoft turned down my request for a briefing or interview, so all information here is via my own experiments, the official web pages, or tech support calls.)

The Webinar Blog: Day One With Live Meeting 2007 - Web Access Problems

Comments

[Andre Blumberg]

Yes agreed RoundTable is a cool device and probably the best piece to the OCS story ... Problem is though that in great wisdom Microsoft has failed thus far to certify the devices widely so as a result you only get it in just 10 countries at this stage (US, CA, UK, FR, DE, IT, NL, ES, JP, AU) ... so for anyone outside of these countries, such as Hong Kong, looking to get one there's no published roadmap nor timeline even. This will also mean that companies with international presence that like to use the RoundTable devices can forget about using RoundTable for all subsidiary locations, unless they order them through any of the above 10 countries and then ship them to other countries not on the list. But that likely violates the license agreement (since they are not certified) and you won't have warranty support in other countries.

This significantly weakens the OCS value in my view since LiveMeeting without RoundTable is not much more than what you get with WebEx for a long time and desktop video conferencing, IM and presence can be had with Skype Business for much lower investments.

So, Microsoft, when will this be made available in other countries?

[scoremore]

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