Live Meeting

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Directions to the Live Meeting Training

Thursday, May 15th, 2008

I am running a Live Meeting training course on Friday 16th June.  I thought it would be a great thing to film the journey from the tube station to the training venue. So if you are attending the course, watch the journey to the training venue.

 

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Still time to register

Tuesday, April 1st, 2008

There’s still time to register for my lecture at the Irish Microsoft Technology Conference.

The session I am presenting is entitiled: eStorming with Live Meeting 2007. 3rd April 2007, 13:45 - 15:00 GMT.

This is a new session topic for me and one that covers lots of basics for working effectively with Live Meeting 2007. View the complete session abstract here.

Don’t worry, if you can’t make the event, you can always catch us over the internet in the Live Meeting.

Click here to register for the Live Meeting event at IMTC

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Irish Microsoft Technology Conference 2008

Thursday, March 27th, 2008

I am presenting a session about Live Meeting at IMTC that is happening next week in Dublin:

2 Super Action Packed Days (and 1 evening) for Developers & IT-Pros - April 02 / 03 / 04 - Dublin City

The session I am presenting is entitiled: eStorming with Live Meeting 2007. 3rd April 2007, 13:45 - 15:00 GMT.

This is a new session topic for me and one that covers lots of basics for working effectively with Live Meeting 2007. View the complete session abstract here.

Don’t worry, if you can’t make the event, you can always catch us over the internet in the Live Meeting.

Click here to register for the Live Meeting event at IMTC.

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The 2008 Community Launch Event

Wednesday, March 12th, 2008

We’re putting together a community event at Microsoft in Reading and I’ll be there with the Live Meeting User Group.

On Tuesday and Wednesday 8th/9th of April we will be holding the 3rd Combined IT Pro User Group events in Reading at the Microsoft office in TVP.

This event will involve all of the UK IT Pro User Groups and will have a massive range of breakout sessions so there will certainly be something to appeal to everyone.

For loads of information including the full agenda and registration form see the link below:

http://www.ukusergroups.co.uk

Finally, on each evening of the event (8th and 9th April) we will be holding a small event in Reading at a local restaurant. There will be food, networking and a tech quiz with some prizes! This event is limited to 40 places and the sign up form will be live on the same site above over the weekend.

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Conference Call Golf

Friday, February 8th, 2008

The idea of Conference Call Golf came about after seing that @kellypuffs was having yet another extremely looooooong conference call.  So the idea was born.

The Rules

If the opposing team (anyone else on the conference call) start scoring points, you must counter these attacks, after all attack is the best form of defence.

The Points

Music on hold 10 points
Not muting phone 5 points
Not introducing yourself 3 points
Leaving and rejoining for no reason 2 points.

All RFCs on new standards welcomed.  Should we create a league?

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Next LMUG event on 26th February at 4pm GMT

Thursday, January 24th, 2008

The next LMUG webcast is on 26th February at 4pm GMT. Thanks to everyone that attended the first meeting. We voted on content ideas for the next webcast, and the comunity decided! So keep the ideas coming.

If you would like to come to this event, please post a message in the webcast forum until I setup the registration for this event.

Virtual BreakOut rooms for Live Meeting 2007

Date: Tuesday February 26th 2008, 4pm GMT
Speakers: Chris Dalby: Live Meeting User Group
Where: Online - Live Meeting webcast
Product: Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2007
Audience(s): Users, presenters, developers and resellers of Live Meeting
Duration: 60 Minutes ish
Language: English.

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LMUG Webcast 4: Events and Round Table slides

Thursday, January 24th, 2008
SlideShare | View | Upload your own

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Still time to Register for the Round Table webcast

Thursday, January 24th, 2008

 

Event organising with Live Meeting 2007 and Round Table

Date: Wednesday January 24th 2007, 4pm GMT
Speakers: Chris Dalby: Live Meeting User Group and Mark Deakin, Microsoft UK
Where: Online - Live Meeting webcast
Product: Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2007
Audience(s): Users, presenters, developers and resellers of Live Meeting
Duration: 60 Minutes ish
Language: English.

What’s new in 2007?
Different types of meetings and events
Viewing and creating events
Creating custom registration pages and surveys
Using content to engage participants
An introduction to Round Table

Click here to register for the event

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Register for the Round Table webcast

Sunday, January 6th, 2008

Don’t forget to register for the event on the 24th January at 4pm. I’ll be co-presenting this webcast with Mark Deakin from Microsoft and will show case Round Table.

Date: Wednesday January 24th 2007, 4pm GMT
Speakers: Chris Dalby: Live Meeting User Group and Mark Deakin, Microsoft UK
Where: Online - Live Meeting webcast
Product: Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2007
Audience(s): Users, presenters, developers and resellers of Live Meeting
Duration: 60 Minutes ish
Language: English.

What’s new in 2007?
Different types of meetings and events
Viewing and creating events
Creating custom registration pages and surveys
Using content to engage participants
An introduction to Round Table

Click here to register for the event

Or visit the Live Meeting User Group website for more details.

Round Table is a 360 degree panoramic conferencing camera and voip phone that is designed to work with Office Communications Server 2007 or Live Meeting 2007.

Microsoft RoundTable is an advanced collaboration and conferencing device that provides meeting participants with an engaging, immersive conferencing experience. Combined with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 or Microsoft Office Live Meeting service (2007), RoundTable provides a 360-degree view of the conference room, wideband audio, and video that tracks the flow of conversation between multiple speakers.

roundtable.jpg

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Check out the slides from the latest Live Meeting User Group Webcast

Tuesday, December 11th, 2007
SlideShare | View | Upload your own

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Microsoft CoffeeTalk: Unified Communications and VOIP

Wednesday, December 5th, 2007

Microsoft is piloting a more local and informal technical event, called “Microsoft CoffeeTalks” at select Starbucks coffeehouses. The Unified Communications and VOIP event will be taking place in Cambridge on 13 December 2007 4pm-6pm GMT, and Eileen Brown will be running the show.

Our team is excited about visiting these locations and meeting with the technical community, and we will use your feedback to determine if these events should be rolled out more broadly.

This is a big topic and in this session we will look to dispel some myths about the complexity of UC and VOIP. You should walk away knowing where to start in an evaluation of UC and VOIP for your business.

I’ll be attending to represent the Live Meeting User Group and hope that I can be of some insight to UC and VOIP.

Schedule
4pm Welcome, presentation talk with discussion & debate
6pm Close

Click here for more details.

Make sure you get the right Starbucks as I believe there are more than one in Cambridge:

Starbucks
25 Fitzroy Street
Cambridge CB1 1ER
United Kingdom

Here is a link to a map.

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Round Table demo confirmed

Wednesday, December 5th, 2007

Mark Deakin has very kindly agreed to demo Round Table in a Live Meeting User Group webcast on 11th January 2008, 4pm GMT.

Hugely pleased we have the opportunity to show off this excellent piece of kit.  Sign up for the webcast here.

roundtable.jpg

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Live Meeting User Group events

Friday, November 23rd, 2007

11 December 2007 - Introduction to Live Meeting 2007
16:00 - 17:00 GMT

Join us for a first look at Live Meeting 2007 where we will give you a whirlwind tour of the new features of 2007 and cover the basics for getting the most out of Live Meeting.

What’s new in 2007?
Navigating the Live Meeting 2007 interface
Sharing applications and desktops
Register for the event here

10 January 2008 - Event organising with Live Meeting 2007 and Round Table
16:00 - 17:00 GMT

Join us for this second event on Live Meeting 2007.

What’s new in 2007?
Different types of meetings and events
The registration piece
Creating a public event
Administering events
Understanding meeting details

Register for the event

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De unifying Unified Communications

Tuesday, November 20th, 2007

On 16th October 2007, Microsoft launched their Unified Communications (UC) vision designed to seriously compete with the market leader in web collaboration, Webex. A long awaited launch with a whole host of features:

Office Communications Server 2007 (OCS)
Office Communicator 2007
Live Meeting 2007
Exchange Hosted Services (EHS)
Round Table and other sexy UC endpoint hardware

The launch

I wasn’t lucky enough to attend the launch in Redmond on 16th October, but I made the OCS launch at Vinopolis in London the day after. One of my first tweets at the OCS launch was:

Unified. Simplified is the tagline. With 20 servers?

This tagline headed a power point deck with a Visio diagram to die for. I wish I had taken a photo, because there must have been 20 servers on the diagram. Each server requiring various certificates and roles configured. It might well be unified, but simplified with that many servers? I think not.

The demo in the session I saw showed how to provision a new user for UC within an enterprise by doing a point and click operation in Active Directory, and as if by magic, UC utopia. While it’s really nice to see the end game, I would have been far more impressed to see a similar demo of configuring federation for Public IM connectivity, or how easy it is to deploy certificates across the range of servers and roles requiring quite advanced configuration to allow communication with the rest of the world. Or how easy it might be to configure OCS to talk to your PBX and enable a truly VOIP experience.

The Microsoft UC offering is compelling

Microsoft’s UC vision does deliver the goods . The product rocks and the features are hard to be beaten by any vendor on the market. But the haphazard way the UC launch has happened has been far from the fault of the product and leaves a lot to be desired from an organisational and rational point of view.

How do I buy Unified Communications?

Microsoft does not sell the hosted UC products, meaning pretty much half the UC offering, and arguably the most important, are not available to buy from Microsoft but from partners and resellers. In the UK, the top level Live Meeting resellers are BT, Verizon and Intercall.

So when you buy a hosted Microsoft UC experience, you are not buying the Microsoft UC vision, but a watered down version of the vision tweaked to suit the service provider according to their contract and agreed terms. Ask a conferencing provider to turn on free VOIP and I’m sure they’ll bend over and say lather me up.

Choosing and finding a partner is confusing and can be a long protracted process to actually track down the right person to speak to inside these vastly sized resellers. Across the board, the resellers have virtually no product knowledge across the range of Microsoft’s UC offerings, which doesn’t lend itself to be Unified. Resellers pick and choose what to sell. So even those resellers offering all the UC products, will probably break the different products between completely separate departments with minimal cross knowledge.

Whatever happened to Live Meeting?

One of the simplest and most innovative parts of the UC offering is Round Table hooked into hosted Live Meeting 2007. This is point and click and the fastest way for any user to be up and running with an incredible system for no network or hardware investment. However, Live Meeting was barely mentioned at all during the UC or OCS launches. So why the silent launch of Live Meeting 2007?

There continues to appear to be no official line regarding the roll out date for existing Live Meeting 2005 customers to be upgraded to the most excellent 2007 service as was widely boasted would happen. Only rumours of release dates and pricing then hasty backtracking and still no pricing or availability.

Brand new customers only.

There are a series of adverts running in the UK where a guy goes into a bank and is told that the advertised deals he saw only apply to “Brand new customers only.” The UC offering from Microsoft comes across like this also. Microsoft is rolling out 60 day trials of Live Meeting 2007 to Joe Public on their website, which means they are confident in the product.

The lack of roll out for existing customers is surely a sign of a disorganised and unplanned launch programme. Major resellers have still not signed contracts, agreed terms, or decided upon pricing and licensing.

The Upgrade

Microsoft have allocated date slots to the hosting providers for upgrading existing 2005 sites to Live Meeting 2007. This means that depending how far your provider is down the food chain, will depend upon when you get Live Meeting 2007. Don’t expect the upgrade process to happen before January 2008.

This is a botched policy and a case of peeking inside the barn door to check whether the horse has bolted and not realising it kicked the back door down a week ago.

The livemeeting.com/cc/microsoft domain was launched months ago. Surely a trial upgrade process designed to pre-run and test the upgrade process. What happened during this process that delayed the roll out?

Unified Communications Endpoints

Microsoft has launched a truly plethora of excellent hardware to accompany the UC launch and designed to work with OCS, Live Meeting, Office Communicator et al. As with the majority of Microsoft hardware, the quality is excellent. The Jabra IP phones and headsets that I have seen are difficult to be beaten by anyone.

Round Table

The most exciting piece of hardware on the market at the moment for communication is Round Table. Nothing comes close to the level of interaction you can get from Round Table. Designed to live in the centre of a board room table or office desk, Round Table will replace your standard Polycom conferencing phone as the bench mark for communicating.

Round Table is an IP phone and 360 degree panoramic camera with voice and eye recognition that follows the active speaker while maintaining a panoramic view of everyone round the table.

Every non Microsoft person I speak to has not heard about Round Table. This is a travesty given the level of interaction and collaboration that this product brings to the video conferencing arena.

Disappointingly, Round Table only works as a web cam when not used with OCS or hosted Live Meeting. It can surely not be long before competitors release their own version of Round Table. At that point, Round Table needs open architecture, similar in concept to Android for mobile devices.

Conclusions

The Microsoft UC vision and products have closed the features gap with Webex the market leader. However the UC launch has been disorganised and has still not completely happened.

The on premise solutions of OCS are, unlike the tagline, far from simplified and require advanced configuration of numerous servers.

Hosted Live Meeting and Round Table are not being shouted about and resellers need to increase their UC knowledge.

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Buy Live Meeting for £16 per month

Tuesday, November 13th, 2007

livemeeting.gif

For a limited priod, we are running a special offer on Live Meeting at the extra special price of £16 per month. This is for a full featured Named User License with 24/7/365 usage and full application/desktop sharing.

Click here to go to the offer web page for further details.

This offer is available on a rolling monthly contract. Or subscribe for a year and receive further discount. Contact me using whichever way you wish for further details.

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Live Meeting Upgrade rants

Sunday, October 28th, 2007

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Live Meeting 2005 not being upgraded?

Thursday, October 25th, 2007

I was told today that my Live Meeting site will not be upgraded from 2005 to 2007 before I come for renewal in January 2008.

This is not down to Microsoft but the service provider that I buy Live Meeting from.  Effectively what this means is that my site will only be upgraded at the renewal stage and even then it looks touch and go.

It appeared to me from the conversation that I had that new Live Meeting purchases can be rolled out with Live Meeting 2007 straight away and it appears that existing sites are only be upgraded at the renewal stage, rather than when Live Meeting 2007 became available as was widely quoted by Microsoft.

I’m not best pleased to say the least.  This sort of policy is not designed with the customer in mind and most definately does nothing to encourage the retention of my business with that servce provider.  What it does do is annoy the hell out of me and encourage me to shop around with the other service providers, which will ultimately give me a better deal anyway.

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Arthur Pounder Diamond Geezer

Wednesday, October 17th, 2007

I finally met Arthur Pounder today, a great guy that heads the Unified Communications & RTC User Group.  I say finally met, becasue I had a great conversation with Arthur last March and we never got around to meeting because he was in the United States.

I really enjoyed the OCS launch.  You can read the post I made about it over on my other blog on Microsoft Subnet.

Here’s a photo of Arthur, taken at the Anchor on Clink Street, London Bridge.  Arthur has a big smile on his face, because he picked up the bag with the Jabra IP phone rather than the bag I picked up with the equally lovely but far cheaper Jabra headset.  Who knows, maybe one will magically arrive in the post :D

Arthur Pounder

Arthur Pounder, happy with his phone.
OCS 2007 Launch

Mark Deakin talking at the OCS 2007 Launch

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FaceSlammed by Brett Johnson

Friday, September 28th, 2007

A few weeks ago I was FaceSlammed by Brett Johnson, from the UC team at Microsoft UK. The term FaceSlammed is used to describe the process of someone ignoring a”Friend” request. For example, you sign into Facebook and send a friend request. When you receive the friend request, you either accept or ignore. If you choose to ignore, the person that sent the friend request is not informed, but actions speak louder than words and you notice that they have not added you as a friend. So you do not get access to their walled garden profile within Facebook.

Scoble has gone into lots of details about the art of FaceSlamming and the difference between “friends” and “Online Friends”.

I have to admit, I was surprised to get FaceSlammed by Brett for a couple of reasons:

1)  I interviewed brett for the first podcast I did at the EVO community day at Microsoft earlier in the year, where he spoke about Round Table.

2) I started the Live Meeting User Group a few months ago which falls within the UC bucket.

3) I’m simply trying to spread the love about Microsoft products.

4) I expected someone from Microsoft to understand these fundamental concepts about spreading the love and linking in.

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OCS and Live Meeting 2007

Monday, September 24th, 2007

I recently wrote an article, which has been published over on the TechNet Industry Insiders blog.  My opinion on OCS and Live Meeting 2007.  Visit the website here.

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