From meet-me, ad-hoc conference calls to multimodal, multimedia conference rooms in which content persists meeting to meeting... what a dramatic transformation we've seen in conferencing over the years.
When ad-hoc or meet-me audio conferencing first came out, it revolutionized the way we did business. With meet-me functionality, no longer did conference participants have to experience being put on hold and forced to listen to terrible music while the conference organizer manually added other parties to the call.
With meet-me conferencing, all invited participants could simultaneously join conference calls. Meet-me conferencing ushered in the ad-hoc meetings that many of us still use daily and that have greatly improved our ability to respond to situations in real time. This type of conferencing was such a leap forward that enterprises were able to justify entire system upgrades on just the meet-me feature.
Meet Me Here
Well, meet-me is growing up, and now gets its own "room." You see, the original meet-me conferencing was voice only and the information was transient. Unless someone published notes, the information exchanged and the ideas discussed during meet-me calls were not effectively archived -- other than in the potentially flawed memories of attendees. Notes tools/file shares, email, and later Microsoft SharePoint became the de facto tools for capturing information and giving it a permanent shelf life.
But these tools have lots of individual limitations and, more importantly, they don't integrate into the meeting experience. Because of this, you end up searching email for a response to a question, looking through notes for an action item, and searching other tools and file locations because you forgot where you saved the meeting information. The discussion records never seem to be in a single place, and you find yourself spending more time searching for records of the communication than you spent in the meeting!
New persistent meeting tools let you create topic-based discussion rooms that persist over time. These persistent rooms allow communication and collaboration among people who have common areas of interest. You might set up a general meeting room for ad-hoc meetings, but another for your weekly team meeting and a third for a specific project. Rooms have their own unique addresses (phone numbers/room codes, Web addresses/codes, SIP URIs, etc.), so they don't conflict, and make joining easy. Most of the modern persistent rooms also support multimodal communications (video, chat, presence). You can share ideas and information in new ways, collaborate in real time, with specific birds of a feather.
As great as these rooms are, they do pose a problem: How do you manage the additional information exchanged? It was hard enough "back in the old days" to find the meeting notes and action items when all you had was one room... and one mode of communications. Now you have to figure out how to search chat logs to find out if a decision was documented in the chat session happening in the meeting room. The answer is in the industry trend called persistent content.
Stick With Me Now
The idea of persistent content is to store the meeting information inside each persistent room. This is best described with examples:
Your weekly project meeting room may have a persistent whiteboard. It stays in the room week after week until you erase it. Next time you log into this meeting room, the whiteboard is there, with notes from last time. This is a great way to track action/project items without worrying about someone else erasing a physical whiteboard for use during a different meeting. Each persistent meeting room gets a unique, persistent whiteboard. No need for the "DO NOT ERASE" nastygram to your co-workers.
The chat dialog in your team meeting room also persists from one session to the next -- ready to pick up the conversation right where it left off. It is not comingled and buried with other chats.
Your persistent room also may have a file cabinet. This file cabinet stores specific documents (or links to documents) that relate to the meeting. Here's where content like the drawings and spreadsheets participants need for the meetings get stored. Nobody needs to fish them out of the thousands of other documents stored on their PCs.
Pretty cool, huh? Now think of how much easier it is to find things. You can browse and search only the communications history of the room. Some rooms can alert you when something or someone of interest to you is mentioned in rooms you are following.
This is just the beginning.
Real-time communications solution providers are embracing persistent communications as one of the next big things to make meetings more efficient, and more and more of them are supporting persistent communications in their offerings. Video will become more pervasive in meeting, and innovations in this area will change the game even further. Video capture and even video presence will play a role in how meetings are initiated, held, and remembered. Motion detection by your camera, adding intelligence to your presence status, may let others know you are available for a video meeting, for example. Or "always-on" rooms will give folks the chance to drop by your "office" for quick face-to-face virtual meetings. These are examples of this quickly evolving and exciting technology area.
In its time, meet-me conferencing was a simple solution that revolutionized the way we work by putting ad-hoc conferencing into everyone's reach. Now hold on to your hat, because meet-me conferencing has evolved, and these new conference rooms are going to have an even bigger impact on the way we work. Real-time communications solution providers are embracing persistent communications as one of the next big things to make meetings more efficient, and more and more of them are supporting persistent communications in their offerings.
Bob Kent, director of engineering with Strategic Products and Services and Dustin's colleague, co-authored this article.
