[This is pre-release documentation and subject to change in future releases. This topic's current status is: Milestone-Ready]

Topic Last Modified: 2010-03-12

With web conferencing, users can share and collaborate on documents, such as PowerPoint presentations, during their online conferences. Additionally, users can share all or part of their desktop with each other in real time, making it as if the people in the conference were gathered around the same table in the meeting.

A/V conferencing enables real-time audio and video communications between your users (provided they have appropriate client devices such as headsets for audio conferences, and webcams for video conferences).

When you deploy conferencing, you can choose to enable and use both web conferencing and A/V conferencing, or just web conferencing.

With all forms of conferencing enabled, your users can enjoy the richest possible conferencing environment, with any combination of include IM, audio, video, desktop sharing, slide presentations, shared attachments, and shared applications. Conferences can be scheduled or unscheduled, and users can easily add forms of communication to a conference while it happens-for example, starting with instant messaging, adding document collaboration, then adding voice and/or video. New participants can also be added to ongoing conferences in real time.

Policies and Bandwidth Management

Communications Server enables administrators to set policies on the type of meetings that can be organized. This helps you enforce your organization’s policies and control bandwidth usage.

You can define a wide variety of meeting policies, and assign them to individual users and groups of users. You can also set policies that govern peer-to-peer conversations.

Compliance Features

Communications Server provides features you can use if your organization must follow compliance regulations. You can use the archiving abilities to archive content presented in meetings, as well as the content of IM conversations and IM conferences. For more information, see Archiving Server link.

Additionally, the Monitoring Server feature can capture call detail records (CDR), which you can use to track which users talk to which other users using Communications Server. For more information, see Monitoring Server link.