Microsoft ActiveX Conferencing, in a Nutshell
April 1996
Updated: May 24, 1996
Real-time Microsoft® ActiveX Conferencing will be part of the intrinsic functionality of Windows® 95 by the end of the year. The ActiveX Conferencing Software Development Kit (SDK) was announced and released in alpha form at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in March 1996, and is now available in beta form on this site. The first release of ActiveX Conferencing will provide real-time audio and data collaboration of applications that run on the desktop. Video conferencing will follow in future releases.
ActiveX Conferencing is based on ITU standards: Today, it uses T.120 for data conferencing. T.120 is a part of the H.323 standard, and in future implementations, ActiveX Conferencing will be fully compliant with H.323 for audio and video as well. Microsoft will target the Windows 95 and Windows NT® platforms first. Microsoft will then work to ensure that conferencing will be supported on the Macintosh®, OS/2®, and UNIX®. Because ActiveX conferencing is based on standards, it can also interoperate with products that adhere to the standards.
Data conferencing works over several different transports, including IP, PSTN, and IPX. In the future, vendors will be able to install their own transports for data conferencing. Conference members can be connected over different types of connections at the same time (for example, one over an intranet, one over the Internet, and one dialed in over a modem).
Imagine these scenarios:
- A customer is using your product but is having trouble. The customer clicks the Support button or menu item you've added to your application, and gets connected to a member of your support staff. Your support engineer can control the customer's application remotely, and can talk them through the problem. To establish an audio conversation, all the user needs is a sound card, microphone, speakers, and a network connection. No additional hardware or software is required.
- A customer is browsing your Web page over the Internet. When they see something they really like, they click a button on your page to learn more. They get connected to a company representative who can carry on a live conversation with the customer, give presentations shared from their own machine, or lead the customer through the Web site or through applications on the customer's desktop remotely. Control of the mouse and keyboard goes back and forth during the exchange between the customer and your representative; for example, the customer asks questions about a graph your representative shows, your representative explains, and so on.
- You and a few of your associates, from your separate offices, collaborate over a report for the meeting you have in an hour. One person can be working from home, connected over a phone dial-in line. You can talk and take turns editing the document in real time. Note that ActiveX Conferencing is not remote control--someone at each machine must specifically select each application to be shared (that is, a machine cannot see an application running on a remote desktop unless that application is shared by the person at that other end).
ActiveX Conferencing will be built into a Windows release in the second half of 1996. With conferencing, users who are running Windows will be able to share any application on the desktop through the conferencing interface. In addition, the ActiveX Conferencing SDK includes conferencing application programming interface (API) functions that allow application developers to manage conferencing, share files, and share applications without leaving the application itself. Conferencing will include some limited tools (for example, file transfer, whiteboard, and a chat tool). Currently, data conferencing can be established with multiple sites, while audio can only be established point to point. However, multi-point audio and video conferencing will be available in future releases.