Conferencing software company Drum announced that it has significantly expanded the set of features available on its free plan.
The free plan now includes the meeting replay facility, allowing all users to continue to make use of the meeting even after it has finished. Meeting replays can be downloaded and stored locally or viewed within the user's Drum team. Previously, this feature was only available on the paid plans.
Drum announced that it has significantly upgraded its audio to super-HD quality. It has boosted the audio by 40 kHz, which pushes the quality well above that of an audio CD or a phone call made over a telephone network, thereby significantly improving the experience for meeting attendees. This new super-HD audio quality will now complement the browser audio and video available within Drum. What's more, the audio quality also carries through to the meeting replays. Each viewer of the meeting replay can experience the meeting in super HD.
In this Industry Buzz podcast, Marty Parker leads a discussion about the recently released Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Communication.
The Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications 2014 is here, highlighting several important trends and changes in the UC landscape. Let's look first at the quadrants, then focus on what this means and on how the market is changing, from Gartner's perspective. (Note: If you are a Gartner subscriber, this is Research Report G00262527. Also, Microsoft offers a reprint link here.)
WebRTC is an exciting technology, promising to transform communication and "webify" the way we connect to each other, just as the worldwide web has changed so many aspects of our lives. However, as Ray Amara, past President of the Institute for the Future, said, "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." In the short term, WebRTC must integrate with the systems that are in place, including the PSTN and SIP networks.
The 2013 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications (UC) was published on July 31, 2013. The report is authored by Gartner's leaders for UC, Bern Elliot and Steve Blood. A copy of the report has been shared publicly by Microsoft.