Five step guide to setup Meeting Space in Vista

With the release of Windows Vista which is still in beta stages, Microsoft is introducing many inbuilt features which will help the user to achieve many tasks what was earlier possible only with third party tools in Windows XP. Windows XP did not have many tools for collaboration with others and the 2 major utilities were Remote Desktop and Remote Assistance. But they were mostly used for problem solving or using by an Administrator to assist others in their task.

Some common requirements needed for peer to peer networking were to share their workstations to people in remote places or demonstrating some software tools for exhibition or marketing purposes. These scenarios required the usage of commercial software which were either too costly to procure or complexity in installing and configuring the software to meet the requirements.

Windows Vista introduces a utility called "Windows Meeting Space", which answers the requirements what was discussed above and above all it is free and is available for anyone who owns a copy of Windows Vista for business use. Note that I am mentioning this because there are several flavours of Windows Vista and not all of them will have the same features.

Windows Meeting Space allows a user to do the following provided that he is on a network and the other users also have a copy of Windows Vista running.

1. Have a peer to peer discussion either with chat or telephone.

2. Share the desktop or any particular application with other users.

3. Distribute handouts for discussion or sharing points to be raised.

4. Allow one's desktop to be remotely controlled by another user that is part of the meeting for example an administrator could see the errors happening on a user's workstation and trouble shoot without the need for him to travel all the way to the user's location which could be either in the same building or several buildings away in a corporate environment.

How to start a Meeting

Click on Start | Windows Meeting Space to invoke the application. For the first time Meeting Space will require the user to set up the information so that this information can be used to identify the user on the network.

Set up people

And after the information is entered and configured the home page of Meeting Space is seen as in Figure 3.

The available options are to start a new meeting or open an invitation to join an existing meeting. Since there are no meetings available for joining let us create a new meeting and invite other users to join the meeting.

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Creating a meeting

Click on Start a new meeting and you will see the screen as seen in Figure 4. Enter the name of the meeting and choose a password for security reasons. This is the password that the other users will have to enter if they want to enter the meeting. Now the options available are to allow this meeting to be visible on the entire network as the host or not to allow the meeting to be visible on the entire network. This means that if the host allows the meeting to be visible on the network then as soon as the meeting is created the icon and information will appear on all the workstations who has Windows Vista and is running Windows Meeting Space. In some cases the host might not want certain meetings to appear by default and would like to send out invitations to certain people for example the top management level of an organization.

Let us enter the name of the meeting as "Introduction to Meeting Space" and set a password. Once you are done click on the green button and this will create the meeting. Once the meeting is created the screen will change to that as seen in Figure 5.

At the top you will see the list of participants attending the meeting, a provision to invite other users and also the option to distribute hand outs to the attendees of the meeting. Think of this as how you would distribute pamphlets or notes during a meeting to all the attendees. Each attendee is free to scribble on the printout or modify the document and send it for review later. This is a digital format and so the host can distribute any type of file from his workstation and then retrieve it after the meeting. We will see more about this later.

Accepting an invitation from another user

Now let us log in as another user on the network and see how to accept the invitation. Logging from another workstation and starting Windows Meeting Space will see that the meeting is visible on his desktop. This is because the host has allowed the meeting to be visible on the entire network. But the user will not be able to enter the meeting since it is password protected.

Assume that the host has informed the user to attend the meeting and shared the password. When the user clicks on the link to the meeting he is prompted for the password and this is seen in Figure 6.

Now after the user joins the meeting the host will be able to see the list of attendees who have joined the meeting and he is now ready to start the meeting. For sake of simplicity we will have this meeting as a peer to peer meeting between 2 users and use this meeting to discuss the new features of Windows Meeting Space.

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Click on the icon of the white board and you will be prompted to share either the desktop or any particular application on your workstation. The prompts are seen in Figure 7 and 8.

Sharing your Desktop or an Application

Let us share the desktop and then the host will be able to share his desktop with the other users. This will allow the other participants of the meeting to see his desktop and interact with each other. Now when the host is sharing his desktop with others this is how the screen will look like on the other participants desktop. You can see this in Figure 9.

At the top of the window you will see the name of the user whom the application belongs as well as the indicator of who is in control of the application. The blue arrow will allow the viewer to maximize the screen so that he can see more of the shared desktop. When the shared application is maximized you will see that it covers the full screen and looks like the host's own screen and feels as if you are working on your own desktop. But the icons and indicators at the top of the screen allow the user to see that it is not his own desktop but it is the shared desktop of the host. By default the wall papers are not shared and this is to conserve bandwidth.

There are several other features which can also be done with Meeting Space and the possibilities are endless. But we have just given an over view of what Meeting Space can do and how it helps to eliminate the need for expensive collaboration software as well as reduce the complexity for training people for using third party software.