ShareFEST - Collaborating in 3-D: Mercks Virtual Meeting Space for Scientific Collaboration
Published 04/08 courtesy of Bamboo Solutions Community
The first case study I attended at ShareFEST was a fascinating presentation by Ron Burns, founder of ProtonMedia, featuring a demo of their virtual collaboration product ProtoSphere, including scientific poster session functionality that was developed specifically for Merck. Ron said that with ProtoSphere the goal was to "create an application that converged 9 or 10 different applications to live on top of the Microsoft stack, including the integration of SharePoint."
Ron walked through a live demo of the product, which is a 3-D virtual conference area in which meeting attendees are represented by avatars, and includes live conversation functionality via VOIP, text message functionality (including private messaging), even a range of non-verbal expressions (from boredom to hilarity) for avatars to employ. Some of the spaces in the virtual environment demonstrated ranged from hallways, to a scientific poster session which featured individual "cones of silence" (private VOIP areas) around each of the presentations in a large room, to a data visualization room and, of course, a conference room:
Ron mentioned that there had been some concerns regarding the reaction to the virtual environment within Merck, particularly generational concerns, but the survey responses to the initial deployment were overwhelmingly positive. Perhaps most surprisingly, 59% of respondents indicated a preference for the virtual conference environment over an in-person symposium. One of the reasons given for this preference was that in the virtual environment, feelings of intimidation regarding approaching others don't exist (or exist to nowhere near the same extent) as they do in person.
Continuing the live demo, Ron demonstrated the integration of SharePoint within the product via the SharePoint Media Carousel functionality, which allows the presentation of documents in the virtual environment to mirror exactly their document structure from within SharePoint. For a peek at the SharePoint Media Carousel functionality available in ProtoSphere, take a look at this video:
(Please visit the site to view this media)
Ron also demonstrated that user profiles, including a given user's participation in social media constructs such as wikis and blogs is also associated with the avatars. ProtoSphere will be integrating with the "expertise" functionality available in SharePoint 2010, allowing users to search based on expertise, and invite colleagues to join them for a quick virtual meeting based on their expertise. As we saw in the demo, such invitations take the form of a popup on the screen of the user being invited to meet.
For the final segement of the seesion, Ron handed the reins over to Sam Batterman of Microsoft's Life Sciences team. Sam talked about the fact that since ProtonMedia had already brought the social aspects of the virtual meeting space to the table, Microsoft worked with them on the "materializing of objects off of a database ... to fuse together the best practices of data visualization." Sam also provided a virtual walking tour of a data visualization room within ProtoSphere which included the interactive mapping of various data relevant to the life sciences industry.
Additional videos demonstrating ProtoSphere functionality are available at the ProtonMedia site.
Recent SharePoint Questions
- Customize "Send To" menu in Sharepoint 2007
- Site is opening only on Server but not on other clients. How to fix this?
- Handy & Free of Charge SharePoint Tools
- One Document - two sites
- What is the difference between a document library and a form library?
- What is Collaborative Application Markup Language?
- • What is the difference between SharePoint Portal Server and Windows SharePoint Services?
- Why should you use SharePoint?
- Displaying columns
- Best way to apply permission and access
more sharepoint questions
More Articles By
Develop Mobile Applications for SharePoint with Mobile Entree - CMSWire
Develop Mobile Applications for SharePoint with Mobile Entree
CMSWire, CA
By Barb Mosher | Jun 5, 2009 Seeing as how SharePoint (news, site) is so widely used within the enterprise today, it's…
Bamboos Year in Review: Marc OBrien Introduces the Bamboo Online Applications Division
Editor's note: Last year we introduced the Bamboo Year in Review feature, kicking off with a note
While writing the final sentences of my post on how to create a SharePoint blog last week, I realized that I needed to circle back and spend some time… Mobile Entrée is installed as a SharePoint solution and is deployed as a series of features.
Top News Stories Make your plans now to attend the Best Practices Conference this August 24-26 in Washington, D.C. to ensure that you don't miss out on sessions presented by some…Working with the Admin Links on your SharePoint Blog
More Articles Under "News from Around the Web"
Guest Blog by H3 Solutions Jason Hall - Mobile Entrée, Taking a Look Under the Hood
SharePoint on Your SmartPhone, Android Moves to Laptops, Best Practices Conference Speakers List
Google Wave - A Developer's Eye View (The Register)
Last week, Google announced Wave, a…Announcing the Best Practices Conference Speakers List!
Most Viewed Content
