Microsoft fires Web conferencing salvo

Microsoft this week will unveil Office Live Meeting, the first service offered as part of its Office productivity suite. Although the first version will pepper only a few enhancements above the service Microsoft acquired from PlaceWare earlier this year, the move signals Microsoft's long-term aspiration to bring online meetings into the enterprise collaboration platform fold.

As a hosted service, Live Meeting will continue the PlaceWare legacy, competing against market leader WebEx and a host of other players. In this initial incarnation, Live Meeting has not yet been integrated into Office and as such will not immediately alter enterprise decision-making for Web conferencing, according to analyst Mike Gotta, senior vice president of Meta Group.   

In fact, out of the gate, Microsoft must face the challenge of proving itself a reliable service provider.

"Right now, they have an uphill battle to rebrand and reconstitute themselves as someone who can run an online service," Gotta said.

But as Microsoft forges deeper links to its Office system over time, analysts predict the company will likely emerge as a Web conferencing powerhouse in. Deep hooks to the company's ubiquitous Office suite could reshape the Web conferencing landscape by unlocking online meetings from stand-alone, departmental services and integrating them into the enterprisewide collaboration platform.

"The tipping point will come when Microsoft ties the hosted offerings to the Office family of products," Gotta said.

Microsoft's intention in the space is to do just that. The Office Live Meeting service will eventually be complemented with server software offerings to give enterprises the option to choose hosted services, to install server infrastructure behind the firewall, or to leverage a combination of the two, according to Jennifer Callison, director of marketing at Microsoft's real-time collaboration business unit.

"Our vision is that the best strategy is a server-service continuum. It is better if both offerings are available — invisible to users whether they are accessing server or service," Callison said.

This future infusion into Office is Microsoft's key advantage, according to Mark Levitt, research vice president of collaborative computing at IDC.

Although other vendors have basic integration with Outlook and other products, "Microsoft will always have an advantage to provide better packaging and integration of their products with each other than the competition," Levitt said.

But because PlaceWare technology was neither Windows- nor .Net-based, Microsoft must convert the technology to Windows before it can introduce software or provide hooks into Office — no small task, according to Levitt.

"I hope they take their time. It will not be an easy or quick conversion. It could take several years," Levitt said.

Furthermore, major infrastructure players such as Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle will be aided by a trend already in progress, which finds enterprises moving away from departmental Web conferencing purchasing decisions to standardize on a broader collaboration toolset that includes online meeting functionality, according to analysts.

"Web conferencing decisions that were once departmental are mostly centralized now to save money," Gotta said. "Enterprises are trying to standardize on a single Web conferencing provider and are looking at how it fits into the bigger collaboration strategy, and that will favor Microsoft."