Collaborating With Streaming

Sometimes print publishing is just too slow. A few weeks before Streaming Media West 2007, held last week in San Jose, California, I finished up an article on collaborative computing, talking about both the history and the future of group and team collaboration via the web, videoconferencing and streaming.

That article, which will appear in the December / January issue of Streaming Media magazine, stands on its own; additional information gleaned during and just before the show, however, bears mention since it's timely and helps round out both the article and a recent podcast episode where Jose Castillo and I discussed videoconferencing and I interviewed Craig Malloy, CEO of LifeSize Communications (Episode #5 at www.streamingmedia.com/podcasts).

One of the first things I noticed at the show was Accordent's announcement that it had partnered with a videoconferencing hardware company to integrate rich media integration into a more traditional video environment.

Tandberg, a videoconferencing equipment manufacturer that had been looking for a rich media and streaming solution for several years (after having courted Media Publisher Inc., which ultimately signed on with Polycom to provide integration of MPI's middleware with Polycom end points), exhibited at Streaming Media West and showed off the Accordent integration.

"Integrating Accordent's technology with the Tandberg Content Server supports the demand from enterprise customers," said Peter Nutley, Tandberg's director of global product marketing, "to facilitate the management of rich-media content in a single portal environment."

For its part, Accordent apparently views the Tandberg integration as a way to leverage into a space—videoconferencing—that has eluded many of the rich media recording solutions.