max # who can hear...

D

Dan

JK,
You say 15 can be in a conversation......are we talking
talking or just typing? I've seen people refer
to "conferencing" with messenger, but when you read it,
they always seem to have only ever have one friend, I
don't call that a conference. I wish they'd never called
synchronous concatenated text messaging "chat", it's just
not a backwardsly compatible terminologgy for these days
of voice chat servers.

So, from the horses mouth....will windows messenger
enable multi-party audio conferencing, and if so, for how
many, where will the server functionality lie, and if it
resides locally, (as in someone hosts a conference), what
are the bandwidth/per audio stream requirements?

It seems from a previous post, from someone that sounds
quite expert, that a live communications server/latest
messenger connect just isn't, so what is a body to do if
they want to have a round table pow wow? Pleas don't say
ConferenceXp which apparently requires "High-speed
(100baseT or better) connection that supports multicast,
such as a local area network (LAN) or Internet2®".
Cheers
dan




..
 
J

Jonathan Kay [MVP]

Greetings Dan,

I'm referring to just text-based (typing) conversations for the 15 people. Messenger does
not support anything but one-on-one voice/video conversations currently (although with MSN
Messenger 6.x's 'Webcam' functionality you can share the video with multiple people). Myself
(and in Messenger), they are called voice conversations, whereas text is just a
conversation -- since it is an instant messaging application, I think this makes sense.

As stated above, Messenger can't do more then one-on-one, there were some third-party server
solutions to this awhile back, but they're no longer advertised, nor did I ever get a chance
to evaluate them (but I'd love to have the opportunity).

As for conferencing solutions (sans Messenger), on the cheap side (free and low bandwidth),
Yahoo Messenger (http://messenger.yahoo.com) can do multiple users in a voice conversation as
can Roger Wilco (http://rogerwilco.gamespy.com). I assume you already know the expensive
side since you mentioned Conference XP.

Also, you also might be interested in the Microsoft LiveMeeting service:
http://office.microsoft.com/livemeeting
____________________________________________
Jonathan Kay
Microsoft MVP - Windows Messenger/MSN Messenger
Associate Expert
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/expertzone/
Messenger Resources - http://messenger.jonathankay.com


JK,
You say 15 can be in a conversation......are we talking
talking or just typing? I've seen people refer
to "conferencing" with messenger, but when you read it,
they always seem to have only ever have one friend, I
don't call that a conference. I wish they'd never called
synchronous concatenated text messaging "chat", it's just
not a backwardsly compatible terminologgy for these days
of voice chat servers.

So, from the horses mouth....will windows messenger
enable multi-party audio conferencing, and if so, for how
many, where will the server functionality lie, and if it
resides locally, (as in someone hosts a conference), what
are the bandwidth/per audio stream requirements?

It seems from a previous post, from someone that sounds
quite expert, that a live communications server/latest
messenger connect just isn't, so what is a body to do if
they want to have a round table pow wow? Pleas don't say
ConferenceXp which apparently requires "High-speed
(100baseT or better) connection that supports multicast,
such as a local area network (LAN) or Internet2®".
Cheers
dan




..
 
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