EPI Consulting and Deployment Services
 

Hosted Web Conferencing

Microsoft Live Meeting is a hosted Web conferencing service that enables you to communicate and collaborate with anyone, anywhere using just a PC and an Internet connection. From small collaborative meetings to large-scale presentations, Live Meeting is the perfect solution for all of your online presentation and meeting needs.

Microsoft Live Meeting gives you the power to work together with colleagues, customers, and suppliers, no matter where you are. For online meetings, training and events, Microsoft Live Meeting is the effective meeting solution that enables you to collaborate with either individuals or large groups—without leaving your desk.

With meeting attendees participating from their PCs, you can kick off a project, brainstorm ideas, edit files, collaborate on whiteboards, and negotiate deals at a fraction of the cost and hassle of travel.

Live Meeting provides unique interactive tools, integrates with your existing systems and productivity applications, and incorporates a familiar and easy-to-use interface that improves remote collaboration and enables effective meetings for companies of all sizes. And with the real-time collaboration capabilities in Live Meeting—with proven 99.99 percent uptime availability and always-on Secure Sockets Layer encryption—you can conduct every meeting with confidence.

Engage with Groups of All Sizes

Whether you are brainstorming with a remote colleague or presenting a go-to-market (GTM) campaign to an audience of 1,000 customers, Live Meeting offers a media-rich set of tools that enable you to customize the level of interactivity needed with your meeting participants.

Meet your company's collaboration needs from small spontaneous meetings to large training sessions and presentations.

• Leverage the full capabilities of Microsoft Office PowerPoint presentations with high-resolution support for all types of animations and slide transitions, and enable participants to better engage by switching in or out of full-screen view as they choose.
• Share any printable document on-the-fly for online review or editing. With this high-resolution viewer, participants can zoom in or zoom out without losing the quality of text and graphics.
• Share control of software on your desktop without losing sight of participant feedback or text questions. Meeting participants can request control, and presenters can quickly grant control to any participant. Presenters can customize the color depth and screen resolution to better interact with participants who have varying degrees of desktop capabilities.
• Encourage audience participation through collaboration features such as the Question Manager. It enables any of the presenters to view and respond to questions by replying to individuals or to all participants. Other interactive tools include: Real-Time Polls, Mood Indicator, Chat, Annotations, Whiteboard, Text Slide, and Web Slide.
• Draw, annotate, and type simultaneously to simulate the natural interactivity of an in-person meeting environment. Share ideas while collaborating on a whiteboard or brainstorming on a Text Slide.
• Retain all meeting documents and ongoing annotations, edits, and whiteboard and text brainstorming sessions in your virtual meeting room.

Integrates with Microsoft Office and existing systems

Through integration with your existing systems, you can use Live Meeting to collaborate in a convenient online meeting or training environment. From meeting setup and preparation to meeting management and follow-up, Live Meeting provides a streamlined environment for hosted Web conferencing.

• As part of the Microsoft Office System, Live Meeting enables you to initiate ad-hoc meetings from Microsoft Office programs such as Microsoft Office Outlook, Microsoft Office Word, Microsoft Office Excel, Microsoft Office PowerPoint, Microsoft Office Project, and Microsoft Office Visio, or from instant messaging (IM) applications including Microsoft Windows Messenger and MSN Messenger. Organizers can schedule meetings using Outlook (even when offline), send separate meeting invitations to presenters and attendees, and automatically include audio conference information in every meeting invitation.
• BT, InterCall, and MCI audio customers can control audio conference calls directly from Live Meeting, providing the ability to dial out directly to participants, mute/unmute participant phone lines, eject participants, and lock the meeting.
• As an alternative to audio conferencing, Internet Audio Broadcast enables presenters to stream audio over the Internet so participants only need the speakers on their PC to participate.

Familiar and Easy for both Meeting Organizers and Meeting Participants

Because Live Meeting incorporates the Microsoft Office look and feel and streamlines common meeting tasks, participants from around the world feel at home using it. And because it is a hosted Web conferencing service, you can quickly and easily deploy Live Meeting across your department—or across the entire company around the world.

• Get new users up to speed through quick, in-meeting help resources for common tasks tailored to the meeting phase and the role of the meeting participant.
• Manage the presentation or classroom easily through intuitive drag-and-drop opening of files, thumbnail navigation of documents, and a common resource list that maintains an inventory of content available for the meeting.
• Easily maintain control of meeting participants through features such as Meeting Options that enable the presenter to turn interactive tools on or off on-the-fly depending on the level of interactivity needed. Other participant management features that work to improve efficiency include:
  • Promotion of attendees to Presenter or Active Presenter
  • Viewing attendee profiles
  • Sending e-mail messages to participants from the meeting
  • Inviting and removing participants from the meeting
• Schedule a meeting anytime—this virtual meeting location is always available for ad-hoc meetings—no reservation required. By sending meeting guests to the Meeting Lobby instead of directly to the meeting, the presenter has an additional mechanism to screen participants and permit or deny entry.
• Record your presentation as easily as clicking the mouse, without any special equipment required. It is easy for people who missed the meeting (or class) to view recordings on-demand using Microsoft Windows Media Player or by downloading the recording for viewing at their convenience. You can leverage your presentation many times with full-quality recordings.