computerwoche.de

Archiv

ProtonMedia CEO touts SharePoint integration for ProtoSphere

27.10.2009
This month's is seen as an opportunity by thousands of enterprise software vendors to update their own offerings and gain an edge on the competition. Among the growing number of virtual meetings platforms, is touting the integration of its ProtoSphere virtual meetings and training service with the larger Microsoft applications ecosystem, including SharePoint, the collaboration platform which Microsoft claims may have . The Standard asked ProtonMedia CEO Ron Burns about how his company sees the virtual meetings landscape changing as Windows 7 and other software tools gain a larger enterprise profile.

: How does the current version of ProtoSphere integrate with SharePoint and other enterprise collaboration tools?

: Among the several collaboration tools available in ProtoSphere, SharePoint is our newest, and it may at this point be the most pervasive tool already available in enterprise infrastructure worldwide. Teams can securely bring content from their company's SharePoint infrastructure into ProtoSphere's 3-D world through the use of our Media Carousel functionality. Once there, the virtual teams can share the documents with each other, edit, modify, change, and write the content back to their SharePoint infrastructure. The Media Carousels support any file type that can be added to a SharePoint site such as MS Office document and media files such as audio and video. All uploads from the users to ProtoSphere are fully encrypted, and those assets are then passed to SharePoint through the use of single sign-on. Any document changes/additions that are performed solely through SharePoint are automatically updated for those users who are in the environment.

As far as other collaboration tools, ProtoSphere integrates various social networking and knowledge sharing tools that most employees have become used to over the last couple years. Blogs, wikis and other tools allow users to engage information and each other at a higher level in engaging virtual environments.

: How will new features in Windows 7 or its SharePoint connections change enterprise collaboration, and what opportunities do you see for virtual environments like yours?

: Enterprise adoption of Windows 7 is as important a measure of success as any other. Windows 7 essentially is meeting a pent-up demand among enterprises. For several years now, ProtonMedia has been selling ProtoSphere into a large enterprise customer base. We have often seen a desire of the CIO or CTO level buyer for our product, but large legacy installation of operating systems as old as Windows 2000 have slowed adoption. ProtoSphere runs wonderfully well on Windows 7, and we see the enterprise adoption of Windows 7 to be a real opportunity for us to increase the use of enterprise virtual environments.