Features and Functionality of Web Conferencing and A/V Conferencing

 

Topic Last Modified: 2010-12-13

With web conferencing, users can share and collaborate on documents, such as Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, during their conferences. Additionally, users can share all or part of their desktop with each other in real time, making it seem as though the people in the conference were gathered around the same table in the meeting.

A/V conferencing enables real-time audio and video communications between your users (that is, provided they have appropriate client devices such as headsets for audio conferences, and webcams for video conferences).

When you deploy conferencing, you can choose to enable and use both web conferencing and A/V conferencing, or just web conferencing.

With all forms of conferencing enabled, your users can enjoy the richest possible conferencing environment with any combination of instant messaging (IM), audio, video, desktop sharing, slide presentations, sharing attachments, and sharing applications. Conferences can be scheduled or unscheduled, and users can easily add forms of communication to a conference while it happens. For example, starting with IM, adding document collaboration, and then adding voice or video. New participants can also be added to ongoing conferences in real time.

Policies and Bandwidth Management

Microsoft Lync Server 2010 communications software enables administrators to set policies on the type of meetings that can be organized. This helps you enforce your organization’s policies and control bandwidth usage.

You can define a wide variety of meeting policies, and assign them to individual users and groups of users. You can also set policies that govern peer-to-peer conversations.

Compliance Features

Lync Server 2010 provides features you can use if your organization must follow compliance regulations. You can use the archiving abilities to archive content presented in meetings, and also the content of IM conversations and IM conferences. For details, see Planning for Archiving in the Planning documentation.

Additionally, the Monitoring Server feature can capture call detail records (CDRs), which you can use to track which users talk to which other users using Lync Server 2010. For details, see Planning for Monitoring in the Planning documentation.