Etisalat showcases Microsoft Office Live Meeting at Gulfcomms 2008

Live Meeting is a hosted Web conferencing service that connects and engages audiences in online meetings, training, and events through a reliable, enterprise-class hosted service. With meeting attendees participating from their PCs, users can deliver a presentation, kick off a project, brainstorm ideas, edit files, collaborate on whiteboards and negotiate deals.

Abdulla Hashim, VP, Enterprise Solutions, Etisalat, said:

"Communicating with a diverse customer base, employee collaboration with virtual teams are raising the importance of web conferencing and we see it becoming a mainstream tool for communication and collaboration in the enterprise."

He added, "In collaboration with Microsoft, the Office Live Meeting service will truly deliver a outstanding collaboration experience to our customers and help them reduce travel expenses, increase productivity and offer their employees more work flexibility with the advantage of a Managed service model from Etisalat which will remove the entire burden of managing and maintaining service levels for their staff."

Commenting on the new service, Abdel Wahed Bendaoua, Director of Communication Sector, Microsoft Middle East and Africa, said, "Live Meeting is an important example of further empowering information workers and making them more productive and effective. The exciting new capabilities of Live Meeting are a direct result of listening to customers who already use it for ad hoc collaborative meetings, marketing events, sales demonstrations, training sessions and more. It is a key element of our integrated communications vision that helps people and organizations richly communicate and work together more effectively."

Live Meeting helps organizations better connect internally with employees and externally with customers and partners through these features:

• A simplified user interface that helps conferencing participants remain focused on core content.
• Training and event features that give presenters the ability to offer handouts, public class and event listings, and advanced testing and grading.
• High-fidelity shared and local recording capabilities that give organizations the power to archive a Live Meeting session for playback.

The service also supports multiple communication channels to provide an engaging experience:

• Two-way phone offers participants a choice for integrating conference audio.
• Embedded flash, video and audio files help presenters deliver rich content to conferencing participants.
• Live webcam video and initiation and control of audio conferencing with Microsoft Outlook.