Details Emerge On Microsoft's PlaceWare PlansDetails Emerge On Microsoft's PlaceWare Plans

True to form, Microsoft has pegged Web conferencing as a growth market with a future. It snapped up the No. 2 conferencing services provider, PlaceWare Inc., for $200 million in a transaction completed earlier this month. When the acquisition was revealed in January, it sent ripples throughout the Web-conferencing world, as vendors and customers alike wondered how Microsoft's presence would change things.

There's still a lot of uncertainty about how PlaceWare will be developed under Microsoft's wing, but Microsoft and PlaceWare officials are sharing some details. They confirm that the service will be part of Microsoft's newly formed real-time collaboration group and that there will be no further development of NetMeeting, the one-to-one conferencing tool that ships with various versions of the Windows operating system.

At least at first, Microsoft plans to let PlaceWare progress the way it has: as a growing subscription service whose reach is expanding thanks to an on-site enterprise hardware and software bundle launched in August. Microsoft also plans to capitalize on the APIs PlaceWare has made available to software vendors looking to build Web conferencing into their applications.

Look for Microsoft also to promote heavily the concept of user companies using those APIs to integrate PlaceWare with their own enterprise applications and portals. PlaceWare has been delivering this capability, but it's not commonly done. "Our customers have been coming to us and saying, 'You guys have done a lot to help us with tools for productivity,'" says Dan Leach, lead product manager in Microsoft's information worker business, which also is part of the real-time collaboration group. "Now they want to know how we can help with the challenge of building conferencing into their business processes."

One way will be to make the pending Real-Time Communications Server the technology foundation supporting PlaceWare. That would allow customers to host their Web conferences on the RTC Server and detect companywide presence awareness--the ability to tell the online status of others--from within PlaceWare meetings.

The prospect of PlaceWare becoming part of a larger Microsoft real-time collaboration infrastructure is making some potential customers skeptical. For example, if PlaceWare were to be available only as a component of a larger RTC Server purchase--something Microsoft says is not in the plans--some customers would shy away. "Conferencing is more cost effective than a real-time infrastructure, which fails to recognize time differences," says Peter Levin, group information systems manager for consulting firm Sinclair Knight Merz Group, which will be evaluating Web-conferencing products during the next few months. Levin says presence awareness isn't worth the investment for a firm that depends on advanced scheduling to coordinate collaboration between offices all over the globe.

Meanwhile, international environmental engineering firm Black & Veatch is concerned about the privacy and productivity implications of real-time technologies, such as whether presence awareness will infringe upon employees' time and personal rights.

"We're basically on the sideline, watching how the industry matures," says Michael Lamb, director of E-business and Internet services. The company, which subscribes to Raindance Communications Inc.'s Web-conferencing service, will consider such implications before it adopts any conferencing tools that feature invasive real-time capabilities.

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Illustration by Rich Lillash