Audio And Web Conferencing

NetMeeting is Microsoft's network audio and web conferencing solution-including audio and video conferencing. It's compliant with the ITU's H.323 standard for web conferencing. Conferees can communicate across the Internet or TCP/IP-based intranets. IPX/SPX links and point-to-point modem links are also supported - but only for document conferencing. NetMeeting 2.0 is a good basic solution for conferencing.

Installation: Installing NetMeeting's client was easy. It only needed to run through a voice test and enter the ILS's name. ILS installation was just as easy. The online HTML-based documentation is combined with Java scripts to test the ILS.

Documentation: Good. Online documentation can be viewed via a Web browser, and document files (containing the same information) are provided. The NetMeeting Resource Kit is very useful, covering troubleshooting, firewall setup, and proxy server setup.

Warranty: Ninety days on media.

Technical support: Fair. Microsoft provides free installation support for 90 days. Various fee-based support plans are available. Internet service is free, including access to the latest software updates.

Ease of use: Very good. The NetMeeting client is easy to run. Calls via an ILS are simple to make, and Web pages can be customized for call initiation. The whiteboard is object-oriented, and application sharing provides remote control support.

Robustness/compatibility: NetMeeting workstations easily connect to other Net- Meeting workstations and communicate with third-party H.323-based products. Only Windows NT and Windows 95 clients are supported, but Microsoft has announced an alliance with Farallon Communications, whereby Farallon will develop a NetMeeting-compatible data conferencing package for Macintosh clients.

Applicability: NetMeeting provides data, application sharing, and audio and video conferencing over a network, including the Internet. Its lack of H.323 gatekeeper support will limit large-scale corporate use, but it works well when the number of NetMeeting conference calls is limited. Gatekeeper support is less of an issue for switch-based networks with plenty of available band- width.

Test environment: Micron 166MHz Pentium with 32Mbytes of RAM and a 2Gbyte hard disk, running Windows NT Server 4.0. The machine was connected to an Ethernet LAN via a 3Com Link Switch 1000. A 90MHz Pentium workstation with 16Mbytes of RAM and Winnov video conferencing hardware. A Pentium II workstation with 16Mbytes RAM and PictureTel LiveLAN 3.0 video conferencing hardware.

Standards Fever

Standards fever has people spouting letters and numbers that mean nothing to the uninitiated computer user. It is possible to understand a little of the jargon without getting too deep into the underlying details. There are a group of standards that are used for computer conferencing. There are standards for video and audio codecs (coder/decoders used to trans- form analog audio and video signals into compressed digital bit-streams, and back again).

There are standards that incorporate these for holding a com- puter-based conference. In many instances, the standards are also a mix-and-match collection of other standards. Luckily, there are only a few that you really need to know about, which include those from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).

First, there are the general video conferencing standards: H.320, H.323, and H.324. H.320 is a video conferencing standard using ISDN connections. H.323 and H.324 are similar, but H.323 works over a network, like the Internet, and H.324 works with modems.

There is also the T.120 series, which defines a document conferencing architecture. Multiple T.120 standards exist, covering everything from Generic Conference Control (T.124) to Multipoint File Transfers (T.127). The T.128 standard, supported by NetMeeting, allows control of remote applications, just like services provided by remote control programs. What you need to know when considering conferencing packages is whether their features are implemented using the standards and what the features are, such as remote application control. In theory, standards should ensure that hardware and software from different sources work together.