Feature Guide

Live Meeting 2007 contains significant improvements to enhance the end-user experience for Live Meeting attendees, presenters, organizers and administrators. The following list contains detailed information about many of these enhancements.

• Streamlined user experience
  Live Meeting 2007 includes a large area to view shared documents. This helps attendees focus on the shared content during a meeting. Additionally, Live Meeting only lets attendees access toolbar commands that are appropriate for the particular attendee’s permissions. For example, if you play a video, the presenter may access the Start, Stop, and Pause controls. If you share a document, attendees may access annotation tools. Additionally, most common commands such as those used to control audio or to create recordings are contained in easy-to-access toolbars. Less frequently used commands such as slide cycling commands are contained in menus.
• Streamlined Web-based user experience
  The Live Meeting Web-based client program allows attendees who use non-Microsoft operating systems to attend meetings. The Live Meeting 2007 Web-based client has been updated to take advantage of the user experience enhancements.
• Interactive whiteboard and annotation tools
  New annotation tools are available. These tools support rich text, sophisticated shapes, flowcharts, fonts and colors for use on the whiteboard.
• Shared notes pane
  A shared notes pane is always available during meetings in Live Meeting 2007.

Together with end-user experience enhancements, many improvements have been made to enhance the organizational functionality in Live Meeting 2007. The following list contains detailed information about many of these improvements:

• Conferencing Add-in for Office Outlook
  The Office Outlook conferencing add-in lets user view the availability of meeting participants, send meeting invitations, and track invitation responses. Also, this add-in enables the automatic inclusion of audio conferencing information, scheduling meetings from Outlook even while Outlook is offline, and the sending of separate invitations to attendees and presenters. The conferencing add-in is integrated into the Ribbon in Outlook.

• Event and class registration
  Live Meeting 2007 application programming interfaces (APIs) let you use line of business (LOB) applications to track lead information and integrate data such as attendance, registration questions, and so on. Meeting registration is tightly integrated with the core Live Meeting user experience. Additionally, Live Meeting lets you invite prospects by using e-mail invitations and send meeting confirmations as calendar items.

• Public events page
  The Live Meeting Public Events page lets you easily create ongoing marketing events or gather information about business prospects even before the prospects join the meeting.

• Advanced testing and grading
  Live Meeting lets you prepare examinations that use a variety of question types such as True or False questions, “fill in the blank” questions, or single and multiple selection questions. Additionally, you can provide individual test results to the appropriate meeting participants.

• Enhanced recording capabilities

  • High fidelity recordings
    Live Meeting lets you record rich media presentations and replay them in high fidelity.
  • Shared and personal recording
    Live Meeting does not require specialized hardware or devices to record media. Additionally, recordings that are hosted on the Live Meeting service as easily accessible by authorized viewers. Presenters can also create and store recordings on their client computers.

• Meeting reports
  Attendance reports allow event coordinators to view attendee details. Additional reports include meeting and recording reports, trends reports, meeting attendance and poll reports, and storage management reports.

• Meeting content storage and management tools
  Meeting content remains available for a fixed period of time in the online meeting room to support ongoing and recurring meetings. New storage management tools allow for searching content and the removal of content.

• Extended programming APIs
  Live Meeting 2007 includes a broader set of APIs. This allows for integration with other line of business applications.

Live Meeting 2007 also includes an improved interactive experience. The following list describes some of these improvements:

• Improved media presentation
  Live Meeting lets you incorporate media from Windows Media Player or Adobe Flash movie clips into meetings and training sessions.
• Built-in live Webcam video
  Live Meeting lets you display live Webcam video of meeting participants together with their presentations in one of two display modes. Audio-switched mode dynamically moves among meeting participants and shows the attendee who is currently speaking. Alternatively, you can manually select the video image of a particular attendee. Picture-in-picture preview shows the currently connected local video source.
• An integrated media experience
  The new Live Meeting user interface brings together live and recorded video, chat, slide and application sharing, Voice over IP (VoIP) and publicly-switched telephone network (PSTN) audio, and audience feedback tools.
• An integrated Office PowerPoint viewer
  Live Meeting allows for full fidelity PowerPoint presentations including viewing animations and transitions.
• Drag-and-drop support for uploading media
  Drag-and-drop uploading allows for easy importing and viewing of documents. Live Meeting supports importing of wide range of document file types. This includes any document that can be printed including Office, Project, Visio, OneNote, HTML, PDF and more. This feature lets participants bring all relevant content to an online meeting.

Live Meeting 2007 also includes an improved interactive experience. The following list describes some of these improvements:

• Integration between publicly-switched telephone networks (PSTN) and two-way VoIP audio
  Live Meeting supports two-way VoIP audio capability. Attendees can use their desktop phone or computer speakers and a microphone to participate in an audio conference. All audio participants are connected seamlessly and may speak during the meeting regardless of the audio selection. Presenters do not have to consider the audio mechanism that a participant uses during a meeting. Additionally, all audio controls are available by using a single control tool bar.
• Integrated audio conference call controls
  Live Meeting audio conference call controls provide tight integration with telephone service providers. This lets users dial out directly to a participant’s telephone, to mute telephone audio, to eject a participant, to lock a conference, or to use an audio conference call roster.
• Speaker indicator
  A speaker indicator appears on the attendee list to clearly indicate the VoIP participant who is speaking.
• Handout distribution functionality
  Live Meetint lets you scan documents for viruses by using Microsoft Forefront, and then distribute the documents to participants before or during a meeting.
• Virtual discussion rooms
  Live Meeting lets you break a meeting into virtual discussion groups for one-on-one training or to focus on a particular topic. Then, you can return to the main meeting session. Additionally, instructors can roam among the virtual rooms and make broadcast announcements to address participants across the various discussion rooms.

Together with the improvements that are available in Live Meeting 2007, Live Meeting customers also benefit from the advantages of a hosted service. These benefits include:

• Telephone and e-mail-based end-user support
  The Live Meeting service provides telephone and e-mail support for meeting organizers and also for meeting attendees. This includes meeting attendees who are from an organization other than your own. Technical support also includes resolving support issues such as meeting “join” issues or answering “how-to” questions.
• Automatic client program installations and automatic client program updates
  The Live Meeting service includes automatic Live Meeting client installations and upgrades. This helps make sure that all meeting participants are running the latest version of Live Meeting.
• Simplified installation through the use of Intranet portals
  The Intranet Portal feature allows for deploying Live Meeting across an organization. This includes automatically creating user accounts and authenticating with the Active Directory directory service.
• High availability
  The Live Meeting service has a record of 99.99 percent uptime and has been operating for over 10 years. This service is backed by the resources that are available to a Fortune 100 company. Live Meeting is based on the Web conferencing technology that was first offered by Placeware in 1996. Microsoft acquired this technology in 2003. However, the senior leadership personnel and many operations specialists who were involved in the original Web conferencing solution are still involved in the day-to-day activities to operate and improve the service.
• Certified data centers
  Live Meeting data centers are certified by Cybertrust and SAS70. Cybertrust is a leading independent authority. Because the Live Meeting data centers meet the requirements of the Cybertrust Application Certification and Service Provider Certification security assurance program, Live Meeting data centers are permitted to display the Cybertrust Certified seal.
• Security-enhanced communications
  Live Meeting communications use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption together with strong password policies to help protect your meeting information.
• Built-in virus scanning
  Live Meeting helps protect meeting participants by scanning documents for viruses before the documents are presented to attendees. To do this, the Live Meeting service takes advantage of the Microsoft Forefront antivirus program.