Placeware 3.0 Conference Center

By Bob Schmitt
February 1999

Placeware 3.0 Conference Center
Rating	Thumbs Up
Summary	This Web-presentation product scales from small meetings to huge forums.
Platform/ Price	Windows NT and Solaris (server)/$2,220 for 10 concurrent users
Company Contact	Placeware (650) 526-6100; www.placeware.com

Online training and remote collaboration are obvious ways for companies to take advantage of the Internet, and Placeware 3.0 Conference Center is an easy way to get started.

As in version 2.0, audience members and presenters use a Java client running in their browsers to participate in conferences. This client-side interface runs well in both Netscape and Internet Explorer on Windows, but is not supported for the Macintosh.

The 3.0 version concentrates on ease-of-use, allowing the presenter and audience to focus on the presentation instead of the technology involved. One small but useful enhancement is that PowerPoint slides can be loaded right from the presenter console, saving you from converting the slides within PowerPoint beforehand. Presenters have new "create slide" controls for creating slides directly in Placeware, either ahead of time or on the fly. You can use a whiteboard slide for freehand drawing, a text slide, a URL slide for Web pages (which can be previewed before going live), and a snapshot slide for capturing an image of the desktop – great for teaching applications in real time. Two new slide annotation tools were added in 3.0: the erase tool, sorely lacking in previous versions, and a text tool for typing directly over a slide.

Placeware 3.0 Conference Center lets
presenters create new slides on the fly.

Placeware 3.0 has expanded to provide 15 auditoriums, each capable of seating up to 200 members, with additional standing room space for 800 more. The 15 meeting rooms, recommended for smaller groups up to 12 people, have been simplified into more collaborative spaces. The seating chart, chat within rows, and other features of the auditoriums have been removed, so that audiences just log in and view slides.

This is just the meeting room default; presenters also have the option to open up all or part of their controls to the audience. Participants can truly collaborate, uploading and creating their own slides, or annotating existing slides for everyone to see. However, the current implementation can lead to confusion, when a number of people are annotating and creating slides simultaneously and it’s impossible to tell who created what. Until Placeware lets presenters hand over the controls to one person at a time, you’ll have to create your own rules for group collaboration.