Discover Windows Meeting Space

Windows Meeting Space enables face-to-face collaboration among small groups of Windows Vista users—virtually anytime, anywhere. Useful for both business and personal purposes, this tool enables you to share work on computer-based projects with other people more easily and comfortably.

If you have a business, collaboration is essential to your organization’s productivity and success. But there are many obstacles to overcome. For instance, it’s difficult to share files in cafés without a hotspot or in meeting rooms without network access. Most of the time, you’re forced to use alternative methods such as swapping a USB drive.

Giving a presentation or showing your desktop to another person can also be difficult. You’re often forced to turn your laptop screen around or to invite someone to look over your shoulder. Projectors can solve some of these challenges, but they aren’t always available. Even if there is a projector, spreadsheets and other files with small fonts may be hard to read.

Windows Meeting Space, the new collaboration feature in Windows Vista, is a simple yet powerful tool that enables you to work face-to-face with small groups of Windows Vista users.

With Windows Meeting Space, you can collaborate with one person or as many as nine others over a wired network, a wireless local area network (WLAN), or an ad hoc (PC-to-PC) wireless network.

Setting up connections using enhanced security is quick and easy to do. One person initiates a session in Windows Meeting Space. This sets up the meeting session and enables the organizer to invite attendees and send them the password to use for the session. Others can join it, share files, or see the same view of a program or desktop and collaborate in real time.

Security-enhanced collaboration
Windows Meeting Space—and the entire peer-to-peer developer platform in Windows Vista—is designed with security in mind. Invitations and participant authentication are handled by using certificates derived through a common password exchange and verification between the session creator and the attendees.

Ad-hoc collaboration
Even if you don’t have a network, Windows Meeting Space will create an ad hoc (PC-to-PC) network as long as you’re using a laptop with a network card. You don’t need special knowledge about creating or joining ad hoc wireless networks. The process is the same as if you were joining a meeting on an infrastructure network (a typical home or office network). This ad hoc feature is perfect for collaboration when participants do not have access to a network infrastructure—for example, in a coffee shop without wireless access, or with customers who lack corporate network access. Windows Meeting Space and its inventive use of ad hoc wireless network integration opens up a range of new and more flexible collaboration possibilities.

Discovering sessions and people near you
Discover and join sessions using the Sessions Near Me feature. You can easily discover the sessions occurring nearby on a local network or on private ad hoc (PC-to-PC) wireless networks.
Windows Meeting Space also offers a People Near Me feature, which shows you who’s available on the network you’re using so you can invite people to join your collaboration group or another People Near Me–enabled program.

You can invite remote participants via e-mail or a file, if your network supports Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) global connectivity. When potential participants receive an e-mail invitation, they only have to click it and enter the password established by the session creator.

Making meetings more productive
Sharing and working on files with groups is easier using Windows Meeting Space than with traditional methods such as paper handouts, sending files through e-mail or instant messaging, uploading files to common network shares, or passing around a USB key. With Windows Meeting Space, you can quickly start a meeting that facilitates multi-party file sharing. When participants add a file to the handouts area, everyone gets a copy. If one group member makes a change to a file and saves it in the session, those changes are replicated immediately for all session members. When participants leave, they can save a “final” copy of the handout to their local hard drives. This alleviates the pain of managing multiple versions. Everyone can have an identical copy that reflects the results of your meeting.

Getting feedback from other participants is easy too. Unlike standard presentations, where changes can be made only from the presenter’s PC, Windows Meeting Space enables you to delegate control to other users, who can then make revisions even while the original is being broadcast from your computer.

Windows Meeting Space or Live Meeting?
Both Windows Meeting Space and Microsoft Office Live Meeting help you communicate and collaborate in a rich way, and you can use them for different purposes. Live Meeting is designed to help you collaborate from different locations, across corporate boundaries, and on different networks over the Internet. Live Meeting operates on a server infrastructure and can support up to 2,500 concurrent users, enabling larger, more formal meetings that are often planned and scheduled in advance.

Live Meeting is browser-based and can be used with any Windows operating system that supports it. However, unlike Windows Meeting Space, Live Meeting isn’t immediately available to anyone using Windows Vista, and it requires an Internet connection.

In contrast with Live Meeting, Windows Meeting Space is a peer-to-peer application that operates directly between personal computers. No server infrastructure is involved even when you use the application over a corporate LAN or WLAN. Also, Windows Meeting Space is designed to enhance and support spontaneous and informal small-group collaboration (up to 10 concurrent users).