Today my youngest son stayed home from school with the same thing his father has… coming off a really bad cold. I had a string of meetings and discussions, some of which I participated through Office Live Meeting. I used the regular dial-in conference lines for one discussion (that was a problem) but the rest were all Live Meeting, able to view and sync with the presentations accompanying the talks.
Last week Steve Ballmer talked to the Seattle Times with a focus on traffic and education, and said “what’s a high-tech company doing saying roads are a big deal — roads, roads, roads — tell everybody to stay home and work from home. You build this interactive technology; you should be able to stay home.”
With LM today, I was able to stay home so I didn’t sneeze around my coworkers (you’re welcome) and was able to keep some of the human interaction. I couldn’t look into people’s eyes today but I was able to get accomplished more than if I’d been stuck with just a POTS connection.
Kudos to the Live Meeting team for a great product that — as a Microsoft product customer — satisfied me when I needed it most: it worked without a problem. (Many times employees are among our harshest critics.) If I could get easier access to my Sharepoint projects… sync’ing latest versions of docs in the cloud… with people away from the office today, that would have solved some of the other issues today. For all the talk recently about hosted versions of productivity software, I was happy today to have the applications on my PC desktop when my cable net connection went down.