Bringing the Team Together - Unified Communications at Work

re: Bringing the Team Together - Unified Communications at Work

Sean Kearney — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 12:56:27 GMT

!!!

So Roundtable is a super souped up "Common Web cam"?

If I'm reading it right, Jacked into Live Comm and Live Meeting, It would say be in a room with Rodney and Damir, Rick is in his little hideway (somewhere) with a web cam. You have a meeting and as you guys flip back and forth the camera adjusts focus on the individual members?

Now does the system get powerful enough to (with that camera) that say Ruth and Barnaby hop into the meeting session later on in the same room they can use the same camera? Will it automatically "pick up" those extra entities or let them "sign in" and use that resrouce?

THAT is pretty sweet.

So does mean you could have a bunch of those at different locations? IE: Redmond with one team of people, Mississauga with another bunch and maybe a whack of guys having beers in Florida and as each person talks in the different location the camera just zooms over?

What happens tho if there is an arguement between two entities (or more) in the same room? Does the camera "flip back and forth" while it's happening or is there a big of an "Don't interrupt me while I'm talking zone" on it?

Either way NEAT.

So you're going to be giving these away at the security tour right? *cough cough*

Nudge nudge... :)

Cheers

re: Bringing the Team Together - Unified Communications at Work

damirb — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 18:47:34 GMT

Sean, I would not call RoundTable a "jacked-up web cam". It is really a pretty low-cost video conferencing device with a lot of cool features. It can, in fact, recognize new folks as they enter the room and sit down and focus on them as they start talking. There is no need to sign in as it uses voice recognition on its 5 microphones to figure out where the sound is coming from and focus the video to that area - you talk and you are the centre of its attention.

Now, if you have two folks bantering back and forth "argument-like", the camera will simply stay on who the speaker was last. The switch to active speaker looks for a few seconds of dedicated sound from a specific location in order to activate.

It is way cool but will not be given away at the My TechNet Security Tour. You should be able to see one at the Unified Communications Launch Tour. I'll put a blog post up about that event on the weekend so you can register if interested.

Damir

re: Bringing the Team Together - Unified Communications at Work

Sean Kearney — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 19:45:18 GMT

Cool!

Also my apologies to the team at Microsoft regarding the device. In no way did I mean to infer it was a, well, cheap thing.

Just "over simplifying it" in my crude way.

Either way, this sucker is definitely in the "WOW" category. I had no clue it had the voice recognition in there to allow signing in with that manner!

re: Bringing the Team Together - Unified Communications at Work

Steve Syfuhs — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 05:31:12 GMT

Sean, it doesn't quite allow signing in with voice. It just realizes there's another person, it doesn't know who it is... ;-)

...However, that would be super awesome cool(tm) if it could.

re: Bringing the Team Together - Unified Communications at Work

damirb — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 00:47:40 GMT

Right you are Steve. The RoundTable knows that a person is speaking but does not know who the person is. We don't have voice authentication built-in to Windows - though that would be cool.

Damir

re: Bringing the Team Together - Unified Communications at Work

Peter Meth — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 23:01:47 GMT

I am having a really hard time reading the Unified Communication website. Some pages have very little contrast between the background and foreground.

Anyway, I was wondering what the bare minimum software required would be to set up a test conference. Is the server required, or can you go peer-to-peer?

re: Bringing the Team Together - Unified Communications at Work

rodney.buike — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 16:46:00 GMT

Hi Peter,

You can find out more about the requirments for Office Communicator at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/office/communicationsserver/evaluate/sysreqs/default.mspx

And Live Meeting at https://trials.messaging.microsoft.com/site/

Both have trials available.