Web conferencing is becoming richer and more collaborative. Traditionally, the tool has been used for scheduled one-to-many events more than for spontaneous collaborative sessions. With the advent of presence (see my March 7 post), however, collaborators can easily escalate interaction from instant messaging to a web conference or videoconference.

Microsoft revealed this morning at its TechEd conference in Orlando some features of the new version of its Live Meeting web conferencing service available in the fall. The same functionality will also become available in Microsoft’s upcoming release of its Office Communications Server 2007 product, now in public beta. The idea is to make on-the-fly collaborative sessions and scheduled meetings more like face-to-face encounters. The service is geared towards five kinds of web conferences:

1) Spontaneous collaborative sessions

2) Scheduled collaborative meetings

3) Scheduled presentations

4) Large public events

5) Training.

Live Meeting will support videoconferencing through webcams and RoundTable, a 360-degree panoramic video camera developed by Microsoft Research.  The new release has an active speaker function that switches the web cam video from one speaker to another. The new version of Live Meeting works with traditional phones and voice over IP and also integrates rich media such as Windows Media and Adobe Flash.

What will ultimately transform collaborative sessions and meetings at a distance are searching and sifting functions, and Microsoft Research has done significant work in this area. The idea is that if you miss a meeting, you can quickly find relevant sections on demand. This release of Live Meeting includes the ability to record and search the audio and video based on the active speaker, the slide number and the elapsed time. But this is only the beginning.

Soon intelligent meeting systems will let us search based on audio key words and video events such as people entering and leaving the meeting. This functionality exploits 360-degree cameras like RoundTable. Ross Cutler and his colleagues at Microsoft Research developed RoundTable’s prototype and have written about distributed meeting systems. You can check out their work here and get an idea of the functionality on the horizon.

Microsoft Office RoundTable (image courtesy of Microsoft)