Office Live Meeting
Microsoft® Office Live Meeting is an enterprise-class Web conferencing service. With Office Live Meeting, companies and organizations can engage customers through real-time meetings, training sessions, and events that are presented over the Internet.
The Live Meeting service is available to Microsoft Online Services customers through a user subscription license (USL). In addition to Live Meeting Web conferencing features and tools, organizations that subscribe to Live Meeting receive adoption services. This consulting service can help organizations efficiently adopt and begin using the Live Meeting service.
This document provides IT professionals with a description of the Live Meeting service offer available to organizations that are using standard products and services from Online Services.
Overview of Office Live Meeting
Microsoft Office Live Meeting is a Web conferencing service available to Microsoft Online Services customers that supports effective online meetings for organizations of all sizes. With the Live Meeting real-time communication platform, which provides 99.9-percent uptime availability and always-on SSL encryption, organizations can conduct online meetings with confidence.
Why Use Office Live Meeting?
In today’s global economy, where organizations need to communicate in real time with a multinational customer base, Web conferencing is rapidly becoming a mainstream tool for communication and collaboration. Microsoft is helping businesses meet these requirements with Live Meeting, a reliable, enterprise-class hosted Web conferencing service that connects and engages audiences in online meetings, training, and events. With meeting attendees participating from their computers, organizations can use the Live Meeting service to deliver a presentation, kick off a project, brainstorm ideas, edit files, collaborate on interactive whiteboards, and negotiate deals—at a fraction of the cost and without the time and expense of travel. Here are some of the key business benefits:
- Connected organizations. With the Live Meeting service, people in an organization can participate in online meetings, events, and training, so that they can easily connect and collaborate with customers, partners, and each other. The Live Meeting client includes features that help meeting organizers and presenters to share information in a way that resonates with attendees and to better ascertain that they understand the information presented. Because Live Meeting sessions can be recorded and played back, those who are not able to attend a Live Meeting presentation can view it later.
- Engaged attendees. The integrated audio, video, and media capabilities of the Live Meeting service help presenters to keep meeting attendees engaged and conduct more effective meetings. Live Meeting delivers an immersive experience that brings together multiple communication channels, including live and recorded video, chat, slide and application sharing, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) audio, and audience feedback tools. Presenters can receive feedback from meeting attendees in real time, which helps them to adjust their pace and content to meet the needs of the audience.
- Enterprise-class reliability. Live Meeting provides reliable, enterprise-class service. Thanks to its historically high availability and backed by a decade of operating experience, organizations that use this solution can be confident about service quality, reliability, and security features, so that IT directors can reassign their IT resources to other important projects.
Service Design
The Office Live Meeting service is a fully managed, business-class Web conferencing service. It is delivered from world-class global data centers protected by multiple layers of security features and operational best practices. The Live Meeting service platform provides 99.99-percent uptime availability. The regularly scheduled maintenance hours are 10:00 to 16:00 Pacific Standard Time (PST) every Friday for Asia, and 18:00 to 24:00 (PST) every Friday for all other data center locations. During that time the service will not be available.
Organizations that use Microsoft Online Services can easily set up users to take advantage of Live Meeting without incurring additional IT overhead. End users are quickly and efficiently authorized for Web conferencing services through Active Directory® service updates from their IT environment to the Microsoft data centers.
Two versions of the Live Meeting client can be used with the Live Meeting service: Standard and Professional. The Live Meeting service from Microsoft Online Services includes Live Meeting Standard licenses. Standard licenses enable users to schedule and manage meetings of up to 250 attendees per meeting.
Customers can purchase Live Meeting Professional licenses in addition to the Standard licenses that are included with the Live Meeting service. Live Meeting Professional adds features such as hosted recordings, event registration, breakout rooms, and the ability to conduct online testing. The Live Meeting Professional license enables up to 1,250 participant connections and storage of shared meeting recordings for 360 days.
Note Live Meeting Professional licenses can be purchased separately and managed in conjunction with the customer’s Standard licenses.
Security
The Live Meeting service provides an online meeting environment that meets the needs of organizations that frequently conduct confidential and sensitive meetings, both internally and with trusted external parties.
The service is ISO-certified in compliance with 27001 control objectives, and offers significant security controls to protect information that may have serious financial, strategic, intellectual property, and personnel implications. Live Meeting also has the flexibility to host open meetings for presentations that are aimed at the general public. By design, Live Meeting provides security provisions for business collaboration services and a trusted environment for conducting virtual meetings.
Live Meeting security provisions include:
- Strong password authentication policies and 128-bit encryption for access control.
- Data centers certified by Verizon Security Management Program Service Provider Certification (formerly Cybertrust) and Statement of Auditing Standard (SAS) No. 70 for content storage.
- Virus scanning by Microsoft Forefront™ client security.
- Firewalls, network-based intrusion detection systems, and encryption technology to help protect connections and data transmissions.
For detailed information about the security controls in Live Meeting that help protect business information, download the “Microsoft Office Live Meeting Security Guide.”