Trialling Office Communicator 2007/Live Meeting
Well, I must say I like the new Office Communicator. The 2007 version I’m now on has been enabled for some of the things I wanted from the previous version, e.g. being able to paste a URL into chat. Of course the functionality was there in the previous version, but it’s nice to have a fully working version. File sharing works fine too 
The interface
The contacts and chat window have a new sleeker look. Not investigated options yet, maybe you can skin it yourself like Windows Live Messenger? We’ll see. The organisation of contacts is easy, just drag people from group to group. Simple to find people on exchange too, enter the name in the search box, search results update as you type in characters. When you see the person you want listed, just click on their entry and drag into one of your contact grooups. Simple.
OK, what else can you do. Ah, make a video call. Whoops this crashed OC and needed a machine reboot to restart the application. Nevermind, reported and I’m sure sorted by the implementation team soon. See fix below!
Live Meeting
Looks very useful. A quick experiment reveals an apparently reliable, file/desktop/application sharing platform. There is the usual whiteboard, haven’t got beyond sharing scribbles on this yet, wondering if you can past pictures and stuff to it. Something to try. (Trying to activate web cam sharing caused same crash as above.)
So far…
Yes, looks like OC/Live Meeting will be a very useful tool for collaboration. Lots more to look at and poke. keep you posted
To see a Microsoft review of this product …
Update 07/12/09: Thanks to JT for finding out what the issue was with using the web cam causing OCS to crash. The correct web cam needs to be selected in the OCS options before you activate it, else it uses a default which causes the crash.
