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Microsoft Net Meeting is a valuable component of Microsoft Windows XP, and gains several 'under the hood' improvements in Windows Vista. Originally meant as a corporate-grade remote meeting solution, Net Meeting has been embraced outside of the office with aplomb.
To the end-user, Net Meeting for XP can be thought of as an instant messenger program, like MSN Messenger or AOL Instant Messenger, on steroids. Things like chat, the ability to connect by web cam and voice over IP are all part of the netmeeting solution and Microsoft has done a good job on program integration with this package.
The keystone features of Net Meeting are its text, video and audio conferencing abilities, allowing participants to see and hear each other during the conference, no matter where they are in the world, provided enough bandwidth is available for their internet connections.
In addition to chat is a shared whiteboard, allowing users to draw diagrams, scribble notes and collaborate on flow charts. One of the classic examples of this is a physics professor using it as a virtual chalkboard for showing forces acting on an object, while his students, spread around the world, get to ask questions in real time and have the answers illustrated for them.
However, there’s a lot more to the robust set of solutions the package provides to corporations and small organizations. Background file transfers allow meeting participants to circulate slide sheets, power point presentations or audio-visual files without leaving the program, distributing them to either single participants or to all people in the conference, at the time they’re sent.
Microsoft’s Internet Directory web site acts as a “white pages” for other Windows XP NetMeeting subscribers and allows you to strike up full-featured conversations with them if you’re also listed. It also shows what version of Net Meeting these users have and what shared applications they’re running.
This gets used a lot for setting up virtual classrooms and virtual meetings around the Microsoft campus. Like any good internet directory program, it allows users to subgroup people available by department or organization – this makes it easy to, say, set up a Net Meeting conference with everyone in the sales department.
For corporate users, Net Meeting for Windows XP allows you to share applications, which show up in a separate frame, allowing you to minimize the instance of the program in Net Meeting if you need to work on another application, without harming other’s ability to manipulate the program or the files.
Access restriction can be placed on the program, either allowing all collaborators to work on it, after being authorized by the conference chair or letting one person work on it while everyone sees the data. It provides robust support for data locking and preventing conference participants from overwriting each other’s data.
This strong program collaboration ability is one of Net Meeting’s most important functions for small and large businesses and is perfect for coordinating schedules via Outlook or other day planning software or getting input into the latest quarter’s financials on the spreadsheets.
Two prominent authors who collaborate a lot use Windows XP Net Meeting for conferences and circulation of novel drafts and universities and engineering campuses use it for hammering out the details of white papers.
For corporate help desks or even university helpdesks, an active NetMeeting session allows remote access to another user’s desktop – this is an amazing time saver when troubleshooting PCs in remote locations.
To ensure secure operations, particularly important in an environment where remote desktop access is enabled, NetMeeting requires user authentication and password protection, (a big difference between it and an IM program) and beyond that, gives three levels of security, ranging from encrypting file transfers and data in chat and on the whiteboard, all the way up to ensuring that every bit of data is encrypted.
This last level of security disables video and audio conferencing because the bitstream load and encryption overhead greatly impact performance.
Net Meeting’s system requirements are pretty extensive; while the Microsoft website recommends a 90 MHz Pentium CPU, you’re far better off with a modern CPU and a gigabyte or more of RAM.
For the video conferencing, you gain better performance by having a dedicated video capture card for your machine and for anything that’s bandwidth intensive, a high speed LAN connection is strongly recommended or if going over the internet, at the very least, a DSL connection, if not cable modem or a fiber optic line dedicated to your connection.
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