Interactive whiteboard from Alcatel-Lucent hits SA
Alcatel-Lucent, known in South Africa’s telecoms industry as a company involved in laying many of our undersea fibre optic cables, recently demonstrated their interactive whiteboard product at Vodacom World in Midrand.
It marries Alcatel’s OmniTouch 8660 My TeamWork software with a digital whiteboard supplied by Smart Technologies.
In addition to the instant messaging and presence features one expects from a product like OmniTouch 8660 My Teamwork, John Smyrnos, director of enterprise strategic solutions at Alcatel-Lucent, also demonstrated a set of features offering what he called “visual collaboration.”
OmniTouch 8660 My Teamwork
My Teamwork has all the basics of unified communications covered, including instant messaging and audio and HD video conferencing. It uses SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) for its conferencing features which makes interoperability easy, Smyrnos said.
In particular, Smyrnos mentioned that they are able to talk to both IBM Lotus Sametime and Microsoft Office Communicator.
According to Smyrnos they are also able to pull land mobile radios from participants, such as emergency services, into conferences.
A benefit, but also a drawback to OmniTouch 8660 My Teamwork, is that it runs in a browser.
The benefit is that a browser-based application usually means easier cross-platform deployment. Unfortunately the drawback is that it currently only runs in Internet Explorer.
Smyrnos said that they are working on having a new My Teamwork client running in different browsers and plan to have clients running on Android later this year.
Interactive Whiteboard with Alcatel-Lucent OmniTouch 8660 My Teamwork
Why Smart Board?
Asked whether they run on digital whiteboards other than Smart’s, Smyrnos said that they only talk to Smart Board and that it was an obvious choice as it offered the best features and the highest quality.
Visual collaboration
My Teamwork allows a user to share applications or their desktop with others to present something or to collaborate on a document.
Combining this with an interactive whiteboard allows participants to work together in a way that is tactile and familiar, Smyrnos said.
Smyrnos said that My Teamwork talks directly to the Smart Board and demonstrated that lines and highlights drawn on the board are saved into the Microsoft document being worked on as a drawing object.
Configurations
While obviously working for normal collaboration between PCs, Smyrnos highlighted that their system allows for the following configurations as well:
- Conference room to conference room
- Conference room to networked audience
- Mix bag of conference rooms and PCs.
Pricing
Smyrnos said that OmniTouch 8660 My Teamwork and the Interactive Whiteboard are already on sale with licensing based on the number of users and capabilities required.
He said that they are staying under 10,000 Euros per room, including the board and all the required software (client and server) but excluding the server and video hardware.
Per-user costs vary depending on the number of boards and users you want, Smyrnos said, adding that the per-user price will decrease as volume increases.
At the time of writing, Alcatel-Lucent was offering enterprise IM and presence through My Teamwork for $1 or €1 in certain regions.
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