• Illustration: Live Meeting Clients

The Live Meeting Web conferencing service has been updated to help corporations manage usage and simplify access by corporate users. Formerly known as PlaceWare, the Live Meeting service enables users to deliver presentations and get audience feedback over the Web, typically in conjunction with a separate voice teleconference. Web conferencing services like Live Meeting continue to gain ground as a way to avoid business travel for in-person meetings, but Microsoft's service lags WebEx, the current market-share leader.

Meeting Rooms on the Web

Interest in Web conferencing has grown as bandwidth costs have dropped and airline security has tightened, making travel for face-to-face meetings more costly and difficult. For one-to-many presentations, it's often sufficient to e-mail the presentation to participants and organize a conference phone call. However, Web conferencing services like Live Meeting can simplify the management of question-and-answer sessions and provide more interaction between presenter and audience. The Radicati Group predicts that the Web conferencing market will grow from US$544 million in 2003 to US$2.2 billion by 2007.

Microsoft says the number of new customers using Live Meeting grew by 55% in the year to Dec. 2004. However, the market-share leader appears to be WebEx Communications, which had a 67% share in Apr. 2004, according to Frost & Sullivan. (No other vendor held more than 16%, according to the firm.)

Formally known as Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2003, the Live Meeting service supports two kinds of virtual "meeting rooms," which enable presenter and audience to interact over the Web using their Web browsers:

Auditorium. A Live Meeting auditorium enables a single presenter to show a PowerPoint deck and receive feedback or take questions from the audience on his computer screen. For example, the presenter can take questions via Live Meeting’s built-in text messaging or poll the audience and tally the results. The presenter can also display an application on his computer to show (for example) a chart in Excel. Auditoriums are suited to one-to-many meetings for training, sales presentations, and corporate announcements.

Meeting place. A Live Meeting meeting place offers all the capabilities of an auditorium, but a presenter can also give control of the presentation to an audience member and even enable audience members to control an application running on the presenter's computer. Meeting places are best suited to small groups doing joint design or review tasks, such as putting together a presentation or document.

For both types of meetings, the meeting organizer typically logs on to the Live Meeting service to set up the meeting and then e-mails invitations and credentials to participants. Participants access both types of Live Meeting room through a downloaded client, either a Java browser applet or the more capable Windows client released by Microsoft in Sept. 2003. (See the illustration "Live Meeting Clients".) There are several plug-ins for Office applications: for example, presenters use a PowerPoint plug-in to prepare meeting slides for upload to Live Meeting, and Outlook and Notes plug-ins are used to schedule meetings.

Live Meeting rooms don't support voice communication directly. However, companies can coordinate Live Meeting sessions with voice conference calls through service providers such as BT, Intercall, and MCI. For large auditorium sessions, Microsoft and others offer "managed event" services, such as streaming of the presenter's audio to participants over the Internet. Other managed event services from Microsoft include registering participants, managing question queues in question-and-answer sessions, and training presenters.

Improved Corporate Management, Setup

The most recent updates to the Live Meeting service, in Nov. 2004, are designed to make it easier for both corporations and individual users to manage accounts.

Directory Portal Simplifies Log-on, Control

The most notable component released in Nov. 2004 is the Live Meeting Portal for Active Directory (AD), a server application for organizations using Live Meeting. It enables meeting organizers to log on to Live Meeting through their Windows user accounts. It also supports synchronization of Live Meeting accounts with the Windows user accounts. It's intended to simplify access to Live Meeting for corporate users, reduce the burden of Live Meeting user management for administrators, and give administrators more control of Live Meeting usage.

The portal consists of an ASP.NET application that runs on an internal Web server and a set of extensions for storing Live Meeting user account and service information in AD. It provides the following features:

Organizer account management. Administrators can grant Windows users permission to organize meetings or administer Live Meeting service by placing them in appropriate AD groups. Administrators can also set some policies for the Live Meeting service, such as password complexity requirements.

Organizer account setup. Windows users with appropriate permissions in AD can use a browser to activate their own Live Meeting organizer account, after which they can organize meetings.

Single sign-on. Windows users who have logged on through AD can log on to Live Meeting without another sign-on dialog box; they need not manage or even know their Live Meeting user passwords.

The portal is particularly important for some Live Meeting pricing plans, which base charges on the number of users with organizer accounts.

The portal can also reduce administrative effort. For example, because meeting organizers don't require separate Live Meeting passwords, it eliminates the need for Live Meeting password resets. Also, disabling a Windows user account effectively prevents that user from organizing meetings, as the user's Live Meeting password is stored with the account.

Easier Account Setup for Organizers

For organizations that don't have AD or don’t want to implement the portal, Microsoft has updated the Live Meeting Web site to simplify account setup by prospective meeting organizers themselves.

The site now includes an Organizer Self-Service subsite, which enables users to set themselves up as meeting organizers. Each time a user requests permission to become a meeting organizer, the Live Meeting site forwards the request to an administrative contact at the organization paying for the Live Meeting service. The administrator can then approve or reject the request. Organizations can also have requests approved automatically, with a notification to the administrative contact.

Software Tie-Ins Likely

Microsoft says it intends to make major improvements to the Live Meeting service every 12 to 18 months, which would imply a major revision sometime in 2005. (The last major revision was the Sept. 2003 release of the service and the Windows client, in conjunction with the launch of Office 2003.)

Publicly, the company has said only that a future version of the Live Meeting user interface will support languages other than English, including Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. However, additional features are possible, as highlighted below:

Greater Office integration. Microsoft might continue to enhance Live Meeting plug-ins for Office applications. For example, it might enable presenters to run meetings from within a PowerPoint presentation rather than having to export and upload the presentation and then drive it through a browser client, as they do today. Better integration with recent Office versions might encourage deployments of those versions by organizations using Live Meeting. It would also support the company's broader effort to promote Office applications as "smart clients" for doing group work, rather than just as document-authoring tools.

Server application. Microsoft might develop a server product for hosting private Web conferences inside organizations. A Live Meeting server would fill a gap in Microsoft's product line—the company's Live Communications Server and Exchange Conference Server support some kinds of multiway, real-time communication but can't host Web conferences as Live Meeting can. In fact, PlaceWare offered a Java-based Web conferencing application to corporations, but Microsoft would want one based on its own platform.

If future versions of the public Live Meeting service help sell Office upgrades and a server product, it fundamentally changes the business equation for Microsoft. Even if the public Live Meeting service never leads the Web conferencing market, increased software sales could make the service a hit for Microsoft. However, this prospect remains speculation until Microsoft provides a roadmap for future releases of Live Meeting.

Availability and Resources

Some Live Meeting services are available through Microsoft's volume licensing plans. Customers can buy three kinds of monthly subscription licenses through volume licensing:

Service licenses. Every organization buys a service license, which enables it to set up a dedicated meeting service URL at the Live Meeting site and manage its users and service options.

User licenses. An organization buys licenses for named users, each of whom can organize meetings of up to 15 participants. Participants other than the organizer do not require licenses.

Room licenses. To support larger meetings, organizations can license shared meeting rooms that any named user in the organization can employ. A shared meeting room can support anywhere from 50 to 2,000 participants.

Pricing varies, but Select Level A prices from one U.S. reseller are US$200 per month for service licenses, US$11 per month for user licenses, and US$2,000 per month for a 50-person room license.

Microsoft and partners also offer a variety of other licensing and pricing plans outside of volume licensing, including user-minute pricing, which starts at US$0.35 per user per minute. Microsoft also offers managed event services separately from volume licensing. In Nov. 2004, Microsoft announced that it reduced the price of one-way voice-over-IP streaming for managed events from US$8.00 per hour per participant to US$1.20 per hour per participant.

Microsoft's Live Meeting Web site is www.microsoft.com/livemeeting.

Buying subscription services through volume licensing is explained in "Online Services Pioneer New Licensing Model" on page 26 of the Sept. 2004 Update.

The PlaceWare acquisition was explained in "Acquisition Moves Collaboration Strategy Forward" on page 22 of the Mar. 2003 Update.

Live Meeting for IT personnel is introduced at www.conferencing.bt.com/pdf/Live_Meeting/IT_Deployment_guide.pdf.

The Live Meeting Portal for Active Directory is at www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=96C5C38D-599C-48AF-B6EB-B1473418B1BB.