by Erica Driver.

This week I had a 2 ½ hour conference call with one of our clients. Normally I wouldn't blab to the world who we work with. But I think it's necessary here in the spirit of full disclosure — I'm about to rave about a first-time experience I had during a meeting with Microsoft using a Microsoft product called RoundTable.

A couple of my Forrester colleagues and 6 or 7 people from Microsoft were in a conference room in Redmond, Washington and I was in my home office in Rhode Island. Microsoft set up a Live Meeting Web conferencing session and had a RoundTable audio/video conferencing device on table in the meeting room. During the meeting, I had a screen like this one on my desktop (see screenshot below). It showed the PowerPoint slide we were discussing as well as a panoramic video of everyone in the conference room and a close-up of whoever was making the most noise in the room at the time. If we had been using the voice capabilities of the RoundTable device, rather than a separate conference bridge, the video close-up would have switched to whoever was speaking at the moment (including me, if I had had a Web camera on my laptop).