14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft continues to cater to customers still leveraging Live Meeting, and the Office Live Meeting Service Portal release is an illustrative example in this regard, streamlining the deployment and management of the conferencing component of BPOS.
Both the 32-bit and the 64-bit versions of Office Live Meeting Service Portal can be grabbed free of charge via the Microsoft Download Center.
The downloads are designed for business customers that have already deployed Microsoft Active Directory.
For them the Live Meeting Service Portal offers functionality such as:
“•Automatically create Live Meeting accounts for users once they are authenticated on your corporate network.
•Allow authenticated Windows users to log in to Live Meeting without entering a Live Meeting user ID and password.
•Permit users to change their Live Meeting passwords when authenticated by your Active Directory service.
•Automatically synchronize a user's Live Meeting account settings with the user's Active Directory settings each time the user logs in through the Portal,” the software giant explained.
Obviously, customers might also be running Microsoft Office Live Meeting, in order to take advantage of the service portal.
The Redmond company has been offering Office Live Meeting as an online meeting space for business customers.
Moving into 2011, Office Live Meeting will no longer be available as a standalone product, mainly because the Redmond company’s increasing focus on migrating as many of its products as possible into the Cloud.
Fact is that the introduction of new communication and productivity services such as Lync and Office 365 spell the end of Office Live Meeting.
Essentially, Office 365, which is currently still in Beta but heading for a 2011 release, brings with its Lync Online, a new service designed to replace Office Live Meeting.
Lync Online is a complete unified communication service sporting such capabilities as voice, instant messaging (IM), audio, video, and web conferencing.
For a time Office Live Meeting and Lync Online will coexist, but as BOPS customers will be transitioned to Office 365, this situation is bound not to last.