Mac Meetings - Desktop Sharing and Join Experience

As a reminder, the Communicator for Mac 2011 client is for OCS 2007 R2 and provides a corresponding feature set. It is also supported to connect against Lync Server 2010 but it will be treated as an R2 client.

Desktop Sharing

The Communicator for Mac 2011 13.1 update has been released which includes support for desktop sharing. Internally at Microsoft we use sharing to review specifications, documents and schedules. It is a great way for dispersed team members to see exactly what is going on so this update was huge. https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2476505 

Meeting Join Experience

Update February 2, 2011 – Thanks to Deepak and Steve for following up on this, turns out my problem with Google Chrome was as simple as not recognizing the impact of pop-up blocker configuration. Each application is different in the visual experience in this area and for me I didn’t catch the red X on the right hand side as documented here - https://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=95472 .

So this information comes as a result of policy decisions at Microsoft to ensure that all parties join with a Lync client to ensure consistency. This means that for users who are still running on an OCS 2007 R2 pool or using the Communicator for Mac client they will join with the Lync Web App. The one drawback or flaw to this approach is that while I have a dialog for adding audio, the option I use is Call Communicator. While this works rather easily, I find it cumbersome given that I have a client capable of participating in the IM, Audio and Sharing session and yet had to join with the Web App first.

Another note on the Meeting Join Experience is that Google Chrome doesn't work, I believe it is the lack of SilverLight support. As I play with multiple experiences on the Mac and having chosen Chrome to be the default browser this only makes my personal experience a bit more clumsy as I have to copy the url to Firefox and join there first.