Free peer-to-peer collaboration platform from Microsoft Research, including source code!

I finally saw Conference XP in depth for the first time yesterday. Maybe everyone else already knows about it, but it was new to me! It's a peer-to-peer collaboration platform for Windows XP that's freely available for download and includes source. It makes extensive use of multicast, which lets it handle high quality video with a large number of people simultaneously. Microsoft Research is working with Universities who are building some really cool things on top of it. It enables some really cool classroom scenarios. There's a presentation module that lets a teacher walk through a presentation and mark it up and everyone sees it on their screen (and can also add markup). You can also take screen shots and add them to the presentation in real time. On the platform it's easy to write quizzes or games that the teacher can push out to the students, and then get back the results.

The new 3.0 beta has better support for wireless networks, which might suddenly start loosing a bunch of packets. It also has Tablet PC integration, which is perfect in University scenarios.

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 18, 2004
  Dan,
  Thanks for posting the info on ConferenceXP; this is an application/technology that I can use.
  
  Regards,
  
  Sean Gahan
  sean@seangahan.net