Silicon Valley Speaker Series: Microsoft Office Live Meeting

Editor's note: Due to a technical error, the first few minutes of this speech were omitted from this transcript.

AMIT MITAL: (In progress) -- so also an opportunity to present a unified, coherent, highly usable user experience for information workers so that they can take all these different forms of communication and collaboration and use it in a single, easy to use and approachable way.

And what this means is we're talking about taking applications and devices and technology that perhaps hundreds of thousands of people - maybe millions of people - use, and creating experiences with some scale to hundreds of millions of people, and that is the current challenge we're talking about.

So, the agenda today is we'll talk about the Office System, and we'll talk about information workers and how they're related to the Office System. I'll talk about the real-time communication technologies, the RTC technologies. We'll talk about the scenarios, and these range from IM - instant messaging - to Web conferencing, to PC and phone integration, things like enhanced meetings, things like Information Agent, which I'll touch upon at the end of the slides. We'll talk about the benefits which motivate these scenarios and why customers should be excited as a result of these scenarios. We'll talk about what the vision that brings all these scenarios and these benefits together is.

So what is information work and who are these information workers? Well, an information worker is anybody who deals with information. It's a pretty broad definition. It's anybody who creates, manipulates, shares, communicates, edits, accesses, absorbs, you name it, information. So managers, accountants, brokers, everybody; all of us in this room are information workers.

And as you can see, information workers do a ton of different things, and the two things that we're going to focus on are communicating and collaborating.

By the way, let me take a little sidebar here. You're probably looking at the screen going, huh, that doesn't look like PowerPoint presentation mode. And, no, I didn't forget to put it in presentation mode. What you're looking at is a presentation done using Office Live Meeting. So this is the service that is running up in the cloud, my content is up in the cloud, and on the left down here you see the number of people who are part of the Web conference. So this is a live Web conference. So Jay, for example, the second guy on the left is a program manager on my team in Redmond and I think a number of these people are in Oregon and elsewhere.

So, just setting context. On the left side you see my agenda and there are a bunch of other tools that if we have time we can go through.

So the two things we're going to focus on, communicating and collaborating, and what are the technologies that the RTC team and the Office System bring to this domain.

So, what is the Microsoft Office System? This is a relatively new brand. I know most of you are familiar with Microsoft Office, but the Office System is a new branding that we have for a portfolio of applications, of servers, of services, of infrastructure, of products with the applications that come together in an integrated way to provide high productivity use for information workers.

So, the focus is to enable information workers to access the information, to create it, to share it, to communicate it so that they can make decisions faster, better and more efficiently. That is the focus of the Office System.

The two new components of the Office System and the two new components that are relevant to real-time communication and collaboration are Live Communication Server and Live Meeting. Live Communication Server is our new Enterprise Server for presence and instant messaging. I'll talk about that briefly in a few slides. And Live Meeting is the service that you're getting a demo of right now. It is a rich collaboration and Web conferencing service, formally known as PlaceWare. Some of you might know of the acquisition that Microsoft did of PlaceWare several months ago. That is now Live Meeting.

So let's start with some of these scenarios. If you look at the ecosystem that exists today that the information worker - this information worker we've been talking about - faces, they have a lot of challenges. The primary challenge, or one of the primary challenges, is that the phone system and the PC, the two devices, the two modes that you use most to communicate and collaborate and really do your work, are completely disconnected from each other.

Think about this scenario: You want to call somebody and you're at your desk. So what I do anyway is I look up in the name in Outlook using the Outlook contacts, double-click on the name, it shows me their phone number or shows me a list of phone numbers. I decide which one I want, the cell phone or their desk or their home phone or whatever, or their pager, and then I turn to my desk phone and then I transcribe the numbers, which is error prone and high latency. And two out of three times I'll get it right but then if I'm in a hurry, invariably I'll get it wrong and it's just a nuisance.

So there's two things happening here. Number one, why couldn't I just right-click on that phone number and say "dial"? And at that point I'm picking the cell phone or the desk phone or the home phone.

But let's take that further: Why couldn't I just say "dial" without specifying the actual destination? Why is it that I have to think about people associated with actual numbers instead of just people? Because really you shouldn't think about it. The PC has the information about where you are, what you're doing. You have the information about where you are and what you're doing and how best to contact you, and wouldn't it be great if you could connect all this stuff together so that when I said "dial" my system could access perhaps your calendar and figure out where you are.

Maybe you don't want to be disturbed, maybe you don't want your cell phone ringing in the middle of the conference. Maybe the best way of reaching you is by IM or e-mail. Maybe the best thing to do is to contact your assistant or somebody else on your team. And that information is available, but it's available in islands. It's available in the person's head, it's available in his calendar, it's available in other teammate's information, and what we need to do is connect these islands of information together so that you have a productive experience.

Sharing of applications and data is also a big challenge, and here what I mean is not just saying, OK, I'm going to take my document and e-mail it to a bunch of people or stick it in a file share. It's also truly collaborating with other people.

What if I could use Excel or Word and have not just me working on it and then e-mailing it off to somebody else and then getting the changes back, but meanwhile four other people have updated it, and then I've got this merge problem going on? What if I could have truly multi-user sharing where multiple people could work on the same document and content together?

Contextual routing for roaming is something we've already talked about for communication. This is basically the idea that I have context about people, about where best to contact them and how best to contact them.

And then, finally, one thing I want to talk about is single archives. Now, what if when I woke up this morning I could turn to my laptop and say, "Show me all documents and data related to my talk in Silicon Valley"? And this is across e-mail, Web pages, documents, presentations like this presentation here, voice mail, for example, from my assistant telling me about flight information tonight. All this stuff actually exists. It all exists in my PC. It all exists again in little islands and I have to go to the application and say, OK, show me the voice mail, and I've got to go to Outlook and say, OK, show me the e-mails, and I've got my file folder handling my PowerPoint. What if instead I could say, OK, show me all the information about the Silicon Valley presentation, and it's all there, indexed, searchable and organized in that way?

Part of our answer, of course, is part of our information worker story, as we evolve our technology, but part of it is also part of real-time communication and communication.

So to set context, to think about the collaboration space, think about it in two dimensions: in location and in time. And by location I mean other people you're working with. Are they in the same location as you or are they on the other side of the continent? Are they in the same meeting room as you? And then the other dimension is time. Are you talking to them kind of face-to-face in real time in a synchronous way, like in a meeting or IM or in a phone call, or is it kind of disconnected where you send them e-mail and the expectation of a response or when you'd actually get a response is somewhat different, or you put a document on a file share somewhere or a SharePoint share somewhere, and that's going to put different dimensions.

And there's a number of different technologies in each of these kind of quadrants right here. So presence and IM are very lightweight, very ephemeral ways and very ad hoc ways of initiating communication and jump-starting communications. It's kind of you say I want to talk to this person, you just kind of do it and it's done. There's no setup. It's very, very lightweight, and that's one of the really great benefits.

And using IM, for example, is a good way of launching richer services, for example, Web conferences and data conferences, where you're talking to somebody in IM and you're saying, hey, maybe you should talk about this some more and perhaps you should do a Web conference and share the data, and let's walk through it together.

We think Web conferencing is going to grow very, very rapidly. In the last two years, it's certainly been growing at about 50 or 60 percent per year. And it will also be a big catalyst for the teleconferencing market and the videoconferencing market.

The other thing that we think is critical in this space is PC-phone integration, which is something I've talked about before.

In the same place and real-time category are things like smart devices: note-taking, for example, on your Tablet PC, ring cam, which is one of the areas of innovation that I'll talk about towards the end of the presentation, and again instant messaging.

You can think of all this stuff tied together using archival and that kind of pushes it out into the non-real time space. But tying all this stuff together, think about this as sources of information. There are all these different ways you can collaborate and communicate and get information. You need to figure out and be able to codify and describe to your applications and your PC how all this stuff ties together, and that is what we call the Information Agent.

The Information Agent is, basically, think of it as a set of rules. One analogy is the Rules Wizard in Outlook where you say, hey, if I get e-mail from such-and-such person, put it in this folder. Of course, Information Agent is a much, much more sophisticated evolution of that, but it's a way of describing how I take all the different sources of information, of documents, of alerts, of system information, of user context, and make sense out of it and do intelligent things with it.

Our vision in RTC is to seamlessly bring people and their information together, to enable them to make decisions more effectively, more quickly and with greater efficiency. This includes a whole range of spectrums. We've already talked about a number of them. And there's a very large number of very context heavy words in there, let's put it that way. But they all mean something.

We want to be able to take real-time communication and seamlessly transition it to non-real-time communication. We want to be able to have context as a key part, context -- I keep using the word context; let me describe it in more detail. By context, I mean the information about what you're doing, where you're doing it and what you're going to do next, and also context about the information itself. Is it a Word document with high priority, or what is the encryption on it and what's the confidential nature of the information?

You're seeing it getting highlighted here, and I think Jay on the other end of the line is helping me along by highlighting some of the keywords. So that is one of the benefits of Live Meeting.

Now, later on in the presentation we'll demo some other aspects, including he can take over the presentation and move slides. He can annotate. He can change the presentation in real time. He can do highlighting. He can add words, he can point to specific things. We can do things like online polling. So, for example, I'm doing a Web conference and I can ask people, "How many of you have used Tablet PC?" Well, if I asked you here, right, a bunch of you would raise your hands. Hopefully, many of you would raise your hands. But if I'm doing a Web conference, right, I'm talking to a PC. There's nothing raising their hands.

Well, we have the capability of running online polls where you basically see a grid and you say, anybody who has a Tablet PC change your grid square yellow. And it's actually kind of amazing. You see this little grid and suddenly it just kind of transforms into a sea of yellow and green and you say, OK, how many of you use PDAs, and there's a bunch of red smattered in there, and, How many of you use notebooks or how many of you use desktops? And it's actually quite amazing because in real time, all these people could be anywhere, and you see the data just coming at you.

And you can do arbitrary kinds of polls. You can do voting. And again you can do collaboration, as I mentioned. Well, let's keep moving on the vision.

We think that the solution includes not just applications, it includes service like Live Meeting, includes enterprise servers. And the reason it includes enterprise servers is because your critical mission data, a customer's critical mission data, sits in enterprise servers, it sits in ERP systems, it sits in CRM systems. Integration with that, deep integration with that, is critical to make realistic solutions possible.

And finally, we need to be able to do this anywhere and at any time and on any device. So it's not enough for information to be available only when I have a network tap into my notebook. So this needs to include cell phones, it needs to include Tablets and PDAs, it needs to include all kinds of different communication mechanisms as well.

So the next question is why. So what is the benefit? Why are we trying to enable these scenarios?

And the first line kind of says it all: Increase business efficiencies and lower collaboration costs. Time savings as a result of making decisions more quickly and more efficiently. You aren't chasing people down with voice mail and calling your rolodex of numbers.

It's less aggravation. Personally I've been using Office 2003, which has presence information built-in, and I know it has made a difference in the way I communicate and work with people in my group, because now what I do is within Outlook when I get an e-mail from somebody and I want to call them or I want to communicate with them I just right-click and we have a little -- I don't know how many of you have used Office 2003, but there's a little icon which shows up which tells you are they online, what's the best way of reaching them, are they in a meeting, that sort of thing. And that really changes the way you think about when and how you can communicate and work with people.

With Live Meeting, we have some hard cost things. The value proposition can be very, very simple, save millions of dollars in travel costs, in latency and simply time spent in traveling by using a Web conference instead of actually traveling to the meeting. So Jay doesn't actually have to be here. He is participating in this conference, in this presentation, remotely.

We have customers, for example Honeywell, who in their first couple of years saved well over US$10 million simply by using Live Meeting. Hard numbers: this isn't extrapolated ROI, this is hard savings.

And then, finally, improved business outcomes. Again, this is the team saying, OK, I can make more informed decisions because I have more information faster and more effectively.

So really what we're talking about here is a broad platform and a set of applications and most importantly, a user experience that spans all of them. And that's a key thing, because what we think is that the key problem is that of software: intelligent software and innovative software which can bring together all these different modalities and all these different ways of rendering information and accessing information into a unified, scalable and very approachable user experience. And those are very challenging aspects.

So the UI again has a scale of not just to millions of people but hundreds of millions of people, and it needs to work across a whole range of devices. It needs to link into enterprise applications. It needs certainly to link into productivity applications like Word and Excel and PowerPoint and Project and Outlook.

And think about the challenge of tying all this together. Again, the key is the user experience. The value proposition for us is less, just the commodity infrastructure, and it's more about tying it all together in a way which people can directly benefit from.

Now, what we are going to build is only a small fraction of the total solution. This certainly needs involvement from all our partners, our customers, to extend the solution with those value-added services on top, who can build very high value applications on top.

One of the key challenges is to provide a rich set of platform services and APIs which developers can use to build new services that recently you may not think about, and the ability to attract a very large developer base and motivate them to create rich value-add services is a key part.

And finally, we think that we have the long-term vision, the perseverance and the determination to make this space accessible.

So the two solutions I'll talk about today are Live Communication Server, which we released last month, and Live Meeting, the new release of which went live this last week, and then I'll touch on some of our future areas of innovation, such as PC and phone integration and enhanced meetings and the Information Agent that I talked about earlier.

We've already talked about presence a little bit, but the key thing I want to add here is that presence information, in addition to using it to make intelligent decisions about how to contact somebody and when to contact them, it's also critical. It's really, really important that it's available everywhere. It can't just be an enterprise-only solution that only works within my company, but once I go home I don't have access to it. Because this ties back into the point I was making earlier about having a very seamless and easy user experience. If people have to think about, OK, where am I, before they choose how to behave with their application, then we won't get the level of success that we need with this infrastructure to make it truly beneficial to information workers. This needs to be completely seamless. It needs to work across firewalls. It needs to work no matter where you are.

The other key thing is you are displaying a lot of information about yourself and you certainly don't want to broadcast it to everybody out there. And so the ability to describe privacy and describe groups of people who have access to information and actually hierarchies, you know, this person has access to all my presence information, this person has access to a subset, that sort of thing, that's a very important characteristic.

And so an important measure is our ability to bridge all the different islands of information that already exist and bring them together in a seamless way, be able to project privacy controls without making them so restrictive that people don't use them, because really want you want is when you see the little icon in Outlook or in SharePoint or in Word which displays presence information, you want to use it. You want to say, OK, that information, I know it's reliable and I know that if I make a decision based on it it's going to be a good decision. And for that to be true, you want everybody out there, everybody you want to work with to be projecting this information, no matter where they are.

So there's a big tradeoff between privacy and global availability, as well as the ability to traverse across firewalls.

We talked about seamless integration with other communication channels and integration with other i-worker applications, and by that I mean applications like Word and Excel and PowerPoint and Outlook.

So Live Communication Server is our enterprise solution in this space, and I'm emphasizing the word enterprise because in addition to providing presence and instant messaging capability it also provides very deep security and logging infrastructure as well, because if you're going to use this in the enterprise and because IM often is used to transmit confidential data, you want encryption, you want the right levels of encryption. You also want to be able to log IM traffic so that you can archive it, so that you can replay it, so you can forward it to other people.

So that's one aspect of it, and the other aspect is the real-time platform. It's a platform which includes support for SIP, a standard protocol that stands for Session Initiation Protocol, APIs and presence information and all these together provide a platform on which you can build additional RTC applications.

So we've talked about integration with Outlook and Windows SharePoint Services, and here, basically, presence information is integrated into these applications.

So, screen data conferencing, aka Web conferencing, is we believe a very key and strategic area of investment for RTC. Scenarios include remote product demonstrations, so just as easily as I'm showing you the slides I could just be projecting my demonstration that I'm doing on my PC, again across the Internet.

Now, the thing to remember is what you're looking at is not a server sitting within the Microsoft corporate firewall; it is out there on the Internet, so it's available to anybody.

You can do a large number of scenarios using this technology, for example: IR calls, Information Relations calls, sales presentations, financial presentations, marketing demos, sales demos. There's a whole bunch of different things that our customers are using Web conferencing for.

The keys to success, one of the keys to success that we've found over the last couple of years, is being able to address -- since this is a very new market and it's very rapidly growing, we're learning many things as the market evolves. And one of the keys to success is being able to address specific vertical applications as they arrive.

So, for example, if you think about distance learning or the distance education market, many of the people who participate in distance learning are doing it from their home, and so as they are participating in the Web conference, they're usually using dial-up Internet access. So if I'm using my phone for dial-up Internet access, I usually don't have another phone for audio. Unlike the corporation, where you have the network tap and then you have your phone as well. And so, integration of voice and data together is one of the key requirements in that space.

Other spaces, the financial industry, for example, have requirements for regulatory reasons or logging reasons or making sure that they can replay the information or hide information on demand.

I've talked about the service, but as this market evolves a server is a critical component. So corporations do want an enterprise server within their corporate firewall as well. And while today there isn't a very large demand for that, we see that increasing over the next few years. And some of the reasons why are privacy and security.

Providing a quality service with global coverage. Again, this Web conference, there are no limits to the Internet. Somebody in Japan might want to see this. And so, then again, there are localization issues, but there are also cultural issues, and building help into the product so that people can do global Web conferences where the style of presentation here might be very different than that in Europe, for example, or in the East.

And then, because our audience is the end user, is the knowledge worker, the key to all of this, to bring it all back, is the user experience: providing an experience so that people can approach this and use this in a very easy to use way and without a lot of training.

Now, one of the benefits as I mentioned was that, suppose, for example, I lose my network connection. Somebody else on the conference, Jay, for example, can automatically advance the slides and annotate the slides and change it at will. So without touching -- no hands -- he just advanced the slide here.

This slide shows -- OK, now he's getting creative. This slide here talks about what is happening with the Web conferencing market today. The Meta Group believes that 90 percent of knowledge workers will have access to this technology by 2007. Today, it's a little over a half a billion dollar market, but by 2008 Giga believes it's going to be over a $2 billion market. So you're talking about very, very significant growth.

The value proposition of Live Meeting again is to save money -- to save money in travel, in latency, just in time you spend traveling to do sales presentations and marketing presentations, gathering information, going to conferences to get information, ad hoc collaboration, distributed development. You name it, there's a whole bunch of different opportunities.

We've been using Live Meeting at Microsoft for the last three months and our usage has been doubling every two weeks. We literally have thousands of people within the company who are already using Live Meeting, and the usage is doubling, it's skyrocketing. We were quite optimistic about the ability of people within the company to use it, but it's been absolutely amazing and it's great.

Some of the industries we focus on are financial services, high-tech, professional services and healthcare.

So let me talk a little bit about the PlaceWare acquisition. PlaceWare was a company that we acquired about five months ago. It was announced in January of 2003 and cleared in April. The acquisition was roughly $200 million and there were 300 people located in Mountain View and Portland and worldwide in the field.

It's now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Microsoft, and we moved the majority of the personnel up to Redmond to the Microsoft campus. And our business has total responsibility for all functions, including sales, including marketing, etc.

So one of the things I talked about was PC and phone integration. One-click calling, for example: being able to right-click on somebody's name and say call, tie that into presence information for intelligent routing, being able to do conference calling directly from the desktop, not just one-way calling, but being able to add additional people in.

Now, think about being able to do meetings today when you use Outlook to schedule a meeting. Think about being able to do that for voice as well, which you can kind of do, but make it completely seamless so that the boundary between IM and e-mail, that island on one side and voice on the other side, just blurs and kind of goes away.

So think about what that means in terms of how it's transported, how the actual data is transported, the voice data. Is it coming over the phone line or your network? How is it integrated into your applications? How you archive it, how you store it, how you forward it, how you index it, how you search it. All those things need to kind of come together.

When somebody calls you, before you pick up the phone, wouldn't it be great if your e-mail -- well, your PC, knows who this person is. When somebody calls me at work, the e-mail alias shows up. If my phone is integrated with my PC, there's no reason why my Outlook or my Word or whatever couldn't have the same information.

So when somebody calls me and I've been working with them over the last day or two days or three days on a PowerPoint presentation or a Word document, my PC could just open that up for me, or in a nice little folder say here are all the e-mail exchanges you've had with this person.

Because you know what, that's what I'm going to do anyway. Right after I pick up the phone, they're going to say, well, OK, can you open the deck I just sent you or what about this e-mail you sent me yesterday. Why not just have it right there?

Routing based on user context. Again, we've talked about this as well.

Establishing the end user value proposition: I know I keep harping on this, but that is a key thing. Being able to make it completely accessible and easy to the end user is a key thing. And the reason why I keep emphasizing that is because many of these components or these technologies already exist today, but they exist in these completely disconnected islands that are not integrated, and so have very limited value.

Developing the ecosystem for PC and phone integration. Of course, that is a key thing as well. And by that, what I mean is being able to create a cascading effect where the PC leverages the phone, leverages the PC and back and forth. Because if you think about these two things, you have on one side a device which has been around for a hundred years, and it's ubiquitous. Everybody knows how to use it, everybody. It's a very specialized but very easy user interface.

Here's one analogy. When you're using a productivity application or you're trying to do something on your PC and it fails, often you can do retry or often you can kind of back up one step and try it again. And so, if you think about all the permutations of how many steps you back up and then try again, that makes the user interface somewhat complicated.

Think about what that scenario maps to on a phone. Let's say I'm dialing a phone number and I make a mistake. I only have one option: hang up and start all over again. And if it's a long distance or it's an international call that can kind of be a nuisance and I usually end up dialing it three times before I actually connect. But it also has a benefit: It's completely clear, completely unambiguous. There's only one thing you do, hang up and try again.

And bridging that -- I'm not saying you do that on the PC, you're halfway through your Word document and you make a mistake on your spelling that you start all over again. No, I'm not advocating that at all. What I'm saying is there is a bridge. You have with the PC the ability to have a very rich and smart and context-rich user interface and then you have the device, which is kind of ubiquitous. Bridging it together is a huge opportunity.

The Information Agent is this thing, which takes all the notification, all these sources of information that exist in the world around us, and stitches it together so that you can make intelligent routing decisions.

Remember I talked about rich contextual routing of phone calls? You right-click on their presence and say call them. Well, that somebody better have either automatically said, OK, just make the decision based on my schedule, but additionally you want rules that say, hey, between 9:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m., I don't care who it is, just don't call me. Or if I'm in a meeting, IM me but don't e-mail me. Or, if it has this priority and it's from this person, forward it out to my assistant or to this other person on my team. The Information Agent is the way you can codify these abilities and these rules.

And so, the key to success is because this is all about integrating very heterogeneous information and very heterogeneous information forces. One of the keys to success is having access to that information and having predictable access to the information. Again, if you can't count on the information and you can't count on the data or you can only count on it 50 percent of the time, it doesn't have very much value; it's got to just work.

Again, user context and privacy issues, that comes up again, and then making it intuitive, simple and easy to use.

Another area that we are putting significant investment in is this area called enhanced meetings. So I'm going to have a meeting with a bunch of people, and during the meeting we're going to discuss things, we're going to do a presentation, we're going to take notes.

What about if before the meeting I had again a seamless and intuitive and easy to use mechanism of prepping for the meeting, uploading content for everybody to see? Because I know what we're going to talk about; we're going to talk about some document or some e-mail or some presentation, and also some decision we're going to make. Putting the information in a single site, being able to have pre-meeting discussion about it, being able to prep for the meeting, during the meeting, being able to take notes and people taking notes on their Tablet, for example, and having all those notes coalesced so that people who weren't at the meeting can access this information or can look at this decision. And then after the meeting, being able to access the archives and replay the information and index it and search it, again this comes all the way back. Unless I can index and search this information in a rich way the value is somewhat limited.

So one thing I want to do is show you a quick video of one of the technologies we're working on. Let me talk about it first and then I'll show you the video.

This is something we call Ring Cam. And if you think about many meetings and how videoconferencing plays into the meeting experience, videoconferencing has a huge number of benefits and a lot of people use it. But there's also some significant usability issues with it. And one of the things we found was that when you have a meeting and you're sitting in a conference room and there's seven people around a conference table, and let's say now they participate in a videoconference, the person at the other end gets a very single-dimensional view of what's going on. They're staring at somebody on the screen but they have no idea what the interaction is between those people there.

Often when other people talk, especially if their back is to you, you can't really see them, you can't see their expression. Again, you can't see what the subtle interactions are. It makes a very unnatural experience for the people in the meeting that are participating in the videoconference.

All the audio streams, all the voices, are all melded together into one big stream of voice. What if I could have a camera, which sat in the middle of my conference table, what we call the Ring Cam -- a 360-degree camera -- which captured everybody around, could separate all the voices of each of the people into individual voices, into individual streams, could track who was talking then, could archive it in a rich way and then replay?

I'll show you a small video of some of the things we're talking about. That suddenly becomes very, very compelling.

So what we did here was we took a bunch of inexpensive cameras. 1394 is the protocol by which the cameras communicate with each other and the PC. They cost fifty bucks each at retail. We stitch them together to create a 360-degree view. We use microphone arrays to isolate the sound and to improve the voice quality.

One of the big problems in conference rooms, if you really think about the typical conference room, you have a whiteboard, you have a hard table. A conference room is to sound like a room full of mirrors would be to light. The sound is bouncing everywhere, and that's why very often in an audio conference the voice quality, the sound quality, tends to be somewhat poor. And the conference equipment makers spent a lot of money and innovation in trying to improve that. So microphone arrays is a way of doing that.

We use computer vision to zero in on the person who's talking, because think about this: I'm talking and I'm facing my little conference table, but there's a whiteboard behind me and I want to write on the whiteboard but I want to keep talking. And I don't want to talk like this; I want to face and talk because that's what I do. Now, suddenly, my voice is bouncing off the whiteboard instead of coming right to the Ring Cam. And so being able to track the head and figure out who it is, where they're going is one of the key aspects as well.

And then finally the UI which projects all of this in a sensible usable way is an important aspect.

(Video segment.)

So one of the things we talked about -- I didn't actually realize the importance of that until I tried it myself. He talked about I can increase the rate at which it's playing back without changing the pitch. You know when you fast forward through voice mail how everybody ends up sounding like a chipmunk? I mean, that's a very difficult thing to do, to actually make the voice stream come out faster but the pitch not change. And you couple all of this stuff together.

And so I think most of this should be obvious, but on the bottom is the flattened out view of the Ring Cam, or the 360-degree view. This is a view from a kind of a standard camera showing the location of people, and then when you start talking you end up on the top screen, because the camera knows who's talking and the microphone array can zero in on that person, and I think you could see the white box down there on the guy's head, which is the optical speaker detection.

So one of the things I mentioned was the remote user. So think about the scenario as that UI you saw could be used by remote users participating in this conference using the Ring Cam or people replaying what happened in the meeting as well, so it's archival as well as live participation, and the remote user can decide, OK, I want to look at this person; I don't care who's really speaking, I want to see how this person is reacting to the content, for example.

So we see real-time communication as the next productivity driver. For the last 10, 15 years we've invested very heavily in our productivity application suite and the Office suite. We think that the next hurdle is bringing all these capabilities together in real time to enable people to be more productive in a quantum way, not just incrementally but in a very large way.

What we are talking about is a set of applications and servers and services that together present a unified user experience to again allow people to quickly, efficiently and effectively make decisions.

Thank you.

(Applause.)

I'd be happy to take any questions at this point.

QUESTION: Is any part of this kind of like a multi-collaborative version of -- I mean, is there a subsection of this where any part of it is kind of a multi-collaborative version of Net Meeting?

AMIT MITAL: OK, did everybody hear the question? Is any part of this a multi-collaborative part of Net Meeting?

QUESTION: Version.

AMIT MITAL: Version of Net Meeting, right.

So Net Meeting and Live Meeting, while they share a bunch of words in common, but there are some key differences. Net Meeting is primarily a peer-to-peer sort of technology for within the enterprise. What you're looking at here is a service, which is one-to-many or few-to-many or perhaps many-to-many.

Net Meeting has the capability of doing application sharing and application sharing is one of these scenarios that we cover as well.

So in many ways you can think of Live Meeting as a superset of Net Meeting without today the server presence or within the enterprise. I mean, certainly within the enterprise you can use it. I am within the Microsoft corporate firewall and there's another firewall up in Redmond and Jay is using that as well. But it's sort of a different technology deployment.

Does that answer your question?

QUESTION: Yes.

QUESTION: Two quick questions: One, the Ring Cam technology, is this indigenous to Microsoft or did you folks buy somebody recently? And the reason I ask is I'm familiar with a company in Palo Alto who was doing something like this. They started with name server with a queue; I don't recall the full name. This is indigenous to Microsoft?

AMIT MITAL: This is indigenous to Microsoft. This was developed within Microsoft Research. In fact, Anoop Gupta, who is my boss, he was in Research for a while and this is one of his projects.

QUESTION: OK, and then the second quick question is with due respect to Microsoft's current applications, it seems that the challenge that you have in front of you to knit these applications together in a seamless way, adapting these applications to, if you will, an interaction design, which would almost have to be done to make this work cross-cultures and so on, how are you going to deal with that? Because essentially to take on a project like this I would think that you'd almost have to start from scratch to make it a seamless operation that was cross-cultural, if that's your end goal, rather than taking existing applications, which although good applications weren't created with your current end goal in mind. There's a real devil in the details there. I'd like to hear you address that.

AMIT MITAL: That's a good question. I think a lot of this will depend on customer feedback. So I think this is a time where we're going to have to work even more closely with our customers to get their feedback to figure out what they actually want, what scenarios they want.

I do agree that there are some opportunities to be incremental and enhance existing applications, but there's also a whole set of new applications that need to be created kind of from the ground up.

So one example I would use is One Note, Office One Note. If you think about today, I personally like it a lot, especially on the Tablet. It's a great way of taking notes, of scribbling notes, of indexing them. It does recognition, if you'd like, as well. That seems like a great application that can be enhanced for a multi-user collaborative whiteboard kind of scenario, right?

So there are some applications -- well, you know, when One Note was designed there was some thinking which went into it, which said, OK, in the future we'd want multiple people to participate, but in some other applications that might not be possible.

So that is going to be something we are going to evolve and learn about over the next couple of years.

QUESTION: Yes, the question I have is a follow-on. People react differently if they know they're being recorded.

AMIT MITAL: Yes.

QUESTION: That's one thing. They also react differently if they know that this thing is archivable, can be pulled up, they can see reactions, so it takes a little learning curve for people to get beyond that initial, "Oh, I'm on camera, I'd better watch what I say." So some of that reaction until you get three or four conferences deep is probably pretty reserved. So that's one aspect.

The other thing is, is any of this solution backwards compatible? It seems to me that the synergy of what this gentleman was talking about to get the real power out of this you have to put all these things together to be able to use the platform that most people use now, which is Office, and not everyone is on the same version. Microsoft is having a tough time making sure everyone gets 2003 versus 98. Is any of this backwards compatible or do people have to take this chasm leap to upgrade everything to the current version to be able to utilize and get this synergy?

AMIT MITAL: OK. So the first question is about sort of privacy and people's reaction to being recorded and archived. And I actually agree with you; a lot of the feedback we've gotten when we've talked to customers about this, the initial reaction is, huh, that's interesting.

And people conceptually they really see the value. So you saw the Ring Cam demo, right, and you can really imagine, hey, after I had my meeting if I could just send that little thing out, and so you remember that is not a video stream, that is something you can actually interact with, with that application. And that Office application by the way was real; it wasn't a mocked up thing.

So people see the value in that. They certainly do. They say, hey, I don't have to be at all meetings, I can really participate in the meeting after the fact, I can get a synopsis of the meeting really quickly, I can look at what one particular person said or I could use it for my archives.

But when they're actually participating in the meeting, and we've done a lot of usability on this, yeah, people's behavior changes. And so I think part of it is education, part of it is enabling the right controls and making the application sort of non-threatening so that you can say, OK, you know what, just don't do anything with my face, my voice, my whatever.

That's a challenge, because what you don't want is a playback where you've got the ghost running around and you have big voids of silence in your application either. So it's going to be a challenge.

The second is about backwards compatibility. Well, so certainly one way of looking at it is that we believe that our new versions of our application are significantly superior to our old version, that we want everybody to upgrade to the new version, right, and use them and all that stuff. But it is true that most of the world isn't on Office 2003.

And again if we want to make the stuff automatic where you just know it's going to work, then being compatible with the predominant platform is a key to this.

Now, that only goes so far, right. You don't want to say, OK, all Office, all Word 95 and Outlook or Excel 95 users also can participate in the same thing. At a certain point you say, OK, here's my cutoff.

You had a question?

QUESTION: Yes, can you comment on the move from H323 to SIP?

AMIT MITAL: Can you comment on the move from H323.

The answer I could give you -- the answer I would give would be so high level that it probably wouldn't be very useful. I don't know enough to make an intelligent answer, how about that? Sorry.

QUESTION: I have a question. Can you talk a little bit more about the Live Meeting APIs and how they interact with the previous RTC Server APIs that were introduced?

AMIT MITAL: OK. The question is about Live Meeting APIs, how they interact with the Live Communication Server APIs.

So the Live Meeting APIs today are primarily about allowing partners to provision services automatically and so we have partners, resellers who want to be able to use an API as opposed to the UI to set up meetings, to configure meetings, to administer them, to look at content, etc.

There's another set of APIs that we are working on and that we will release over the next couple of years, which are about the data collaboration aspects, basically a platform which allows you to share data, but it's too early to talk about that.

How it relates to the Live Communication Server APIs. Well, the Live Communication Server APIs are really about a platform for presence, so how do I integrate presence information into my application, how do I create clients, which have integrated instant messaging and then also SIP.

So they're somewhat separate today. Moving forward the APIs will start looking very similar and then you'll also see a lot of sort of cross-composition between them.

Does that answer your question? Kind of? Thanks.

QUESTION: My experience with using Web conferencing, I really find that IM is very powerful because you can have a one-on-one conversation or side conversation with somebody while a meeting is going on and sometimes you might even say something confidential or even rude, like this guy is an idiot or something. So I'm curious about whether you're really planning on archiving IM, because I think that would be a mistake. (Laughter.)

And secondly, I'm curious about you say this big push about PC-phone integration, which sounds really good, if PC-phone integration might possibly include the capability of having a one-on-one conversation with somebody during a bigger meeting?

AMIT MITAL: Yeah, I think both those statements are very closely related to each other.

QUESTION: Right.

AMIT MITAL: And I think one of the themes during the talk was the challenge we have in making the availability of the information ubiquitous but at the same time pushing the right level of privacy toggles, widgets so that people can say, you know -- and it's not just having the widget, it's also having the surety, right, because something like that you want to be sure it's not being recorded. So you don't want to dig through five levels of menus to toggle that button or whatever, right, you want to be able to say, OK, it is not being recorded right now.

So, for example, when you call your broker -- well, they do it because it's the law, but every I think five seconds you hear that little beep because it's being recorded. There might be something similar we could do.

These are big challenges where you want to give people either positive or negative feedback which says this is indeed what is happening, because unless you have that I think people will be actually very reluctant to use the technology.

QUESTION: (Off mike).

AMIT MITAL: Yeah, but people want that recurring thing, which says, "No, no, no, I'm not recording you," and say that every five seconds and maybe they believe you.

QUESTION: (Off mike).

AMIT MITAL: And there's also a socialization aspect. I mean, all these things have a very large socialization component.

QUESTION: About the RTC solutions you mentioned, are those running cross-platform or are they supporting the Windows platforms only?

And the second question I have is at the end of the presentation are you able to run a quick demo on Live Meeting?

AMIT MITAL: Well, this presentation was done using Live Meeting.

QUESTION: Right, but other features like the video support or different chat or white-boarding capabilities, so if you can run a demo.

AMIT MITAL: How about we try and do that at 2:00? Is that fine? OK.

But your first question about platform support. So the client for Live Meeting runs on I think eight different platforms, only half of which are Windows, so we have support for Mac and actually even Solaris. And the reason why is because if you think about the customer of something like Web conferencing, reach is a very, very large component, it's a very important feature. And by reach I mean not just 95 percent but very close to 100 percent. And so we need to be able to reach everybody. And so, yeah, we have the support for a very large number of different platforms.

Live Communication Server, the server itself runs on Windows but it supports protocols like SIP and CLIP, which provide interop with other platforms.

QUESTION: (Off mike).

AMIT MITAL: OK, so the question was about sales strategy.

I'll answer part of the question. So, yes, working with partners and having partners is an important component of our business strategy and that will continue to be the case. We do sell by the feet, we sell by the minute, and I think your question was the --

QUESTION: (Off mike).

AMIT MITAL: We haven't determined that.

QUESTION: (Off mike).

AMIT MITAL: That's something we are investigating. It's probably too early to talk about it. By server service continuum, what I really meant was if you look at even corporate Web conferences where you think, OK, this is just within my firewall, at least half of them have at least one person from outside the firewall. And so even for a server-based offering, being able to seamlessly integrate with the service and provide that integration is an important feature.

STAFF: We have time for about two more questions, and this gentleman here.

QUESTION: I have actually two questions. One is you mentioned about distance learning. Are you providing any learning management system behind the systems to support the distance learning?

And the second question is this PC to phone, you know, there has been some technologies in the past like unified messaging, which focused more on the messaging side so how is this different from that technology?

AMIT MITAL: OK. So the answer to the first question is no, today we don't have learning management systems but some of our partners do. There are some projects within Microsoft today kind of in the research phase, which are aimed at cooperating with universities to provide distance learning solutions.

I can't remember the name. I can point you to the Web site but I can't remember the name right name.

OK, anyway, the second question was, yeah, PC to phone. This is somewhat different. This is because here what we're talking about is unifying the experience of the user as opposed to moving data from let's say my voice mail into my e-mail. This is less about the infrastructure and again much more about when I think about making a phone call or doing an IM or sending an e-mail I think about it in the same way, because in the end it's communications. If I think about it from that angle and that lens, then it's a different set of questions and features you come up with.

I'll take one more question and then maybe after we're done. Yes, go ahead.

QUESTION: The big theme that you have in this presentation is actually moving together islands of information. Speaking about Live Meeting, when do you have plans for a complete integration with IM, phone, the Ring Cam technology and stuff like that? Do you have a roadmap in terms of how long and when and when does it fit in and all that stuff?

AMIT MITAL: Well, we're developing the roadmap or we're developing a roadmap that we can communicate externally. And, you know, that's a work in progress. And this is a service, so this is something that we will regularly and very rapidly update. And so stay tuned, you'll hear more and more about it.

Sites to go to, if you want more information about Live Meeting, is Microsoft.com, you know, www.microsoft.com/getlive -- G-E-T-L-I-V-E. Actually Live Meeting will work as well, getlive will work. You've probably seen some of the commercials we have in print and radio and TV. If you go today, you can get lots of free minutes. We have a free trial going on that you can just use live meeting, demo the service and just check it out.

QUESTION: Are these slides available for us at all? Can we get copies of them?

AMIT MITAL: OK, yeah, the transcription will be available. Yeah, I can make them available. They'll probably be available in a couple of weeks on the Web site, on the PressPass Web site. How about that?

QUESTION: What's the Web site again?

AMIT MITAL: So Microsoft.com/presspass. And then just search on my name and you'll find it.

Thank you very much. Thank you.

(Applause.)

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