Technology developed by Microsoft Research matures into a product that is scheduled to debut by mid-2007, providing businesses an alternative to business trips or expensive conventional audio/video conferencing systems.

Just ask any business traveler on a red-eye flight after a few days of meetings at corporate headquarters: There’s got to be a better way for businesses to bring employees together face-to-face.

Microsoft researchers felt sure they could come up with one – an audio/video device that’s mobile, simple to operate and costs much less than expensive video conferencing systems. Now, Microsoft aims to deliver on all three of these original design goals with Microsoft Office RoundTable, a device scheduled to debut by mid-year 2007. It combines the features of a speakerphone with those found in videoconferencing into a device that Microsoft expects will retail for less than US$3,000. That’s about the cost of a high-end speaker phone and a fraction of the cost of most video-conferencing systems. Some of these video-conferencing systems cost $50,000 or more. How many of these set-ups can even the largest, most lucrative business afford to install?

"RoundTable is a table-top device, not much bigger than a traditional speaker phone at the base. It can be connected to a standard PC to offer synchronized voice and video conferencing. The device creates a 360-degree, panoramic video of side-by-side images of everyone who is taking part in the conference. It tracks the flow of the conversation, so the image and voice of the person who is speaking are spotlighted. People across many locations can attend meetings together virtually." said Gurdeep Singh Pall, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Unified Communications Group, in an interview with PressPass.

RoundTable works with Office Communications Server 2007 and Office Live Meeting, allowing companies to integrate virtual presentations, shared whiteboards and file sharing into their audio/video conferences. If someone misses a conference call, the RoundTable sessions can be recorded and viewed later.

RoundTable also removes background noise so you can focus on what the speaker is saying, not the sound of someone in the conference who is typing notes on a laptop. It’s hard to imagine a much better meeting experience, apart from having everybody in the room together.

RoundTable is plug-and-play. One needs almost no training to set it up or use it. It just needs to be connected to a computer that’s running Office Communications Server 2007 or Live Meeting via a USB connection.

The software has been under the testing process called "dogfooding" for the past few months in the Redmond campus and Microsoft campuses in China and India. Also, many companies in Microsoft's Technology Adoption Program (TAP) are getting a chance to try out the devices and provide feedback. More than 19 companies with a total of more than 7 million employees would have tried RoundTable before the final version is released next year.