When I was at Lucent, everybody on the project was colocated in New Jersey, except one guy who was out in the Chicago area. But he was the most important guy on the project! We made this work, and one of the reasons was NetMeeting. But Microsoft can't leave well enough alone. NetMeeting has been superceded by Windows Meeting Space. That's great except that Windows Meeting Space is available for Windows Vista only and there is no NetMeeting for Windows Vista. In other words, if you want to do peer to peer collaboration with a mix of client operating systems, you're out of luck with these 2 programs.
Fortunately, Microsoft has quietly released Microsoft SharedView. For some oddball reason, this is considered a component of the Microsoft Connect program. But SharedView isn't in any specific to Microsoft Connect. Instead, it is a collaboration program similar to NetMeeting and Windows Meeting Space and it runs on both Windows XP and Windows Vista.
SharedView has all the collaboration basics:
- create a meeting (requires a Windows Live ID)
- invite others (using any e-mail address)
- join a meeting
- share handouts
- share windows (including the desktop)
- take control of shared windows
- chat
Missing in all this is the whiteboard, video, and audio. I'm not fond of how the handouts work. When somebody shares a handout, all you can do with it is save it locally. Things would be much easier if the handout was downloaded and launched using the associated program.