ProtonMedia CEO touts Windows 7, SharePoint integration for ProtoSphere virtual meetings

This month's Windows 7 launch is seen as an opportunity by thousands of enterprise software vendors to update their own offerings and gain an edge on the competition. Among the growing number of virtual meetings platforms, ProtonMedia is touting the integration of its ProtoSphere virtual meetings and training service (see video, below) with the larger Microsoft applications ecosystem, including SharePoint, the collaboration platform which Microsoft claims may have as many as 130 million users. The Standard asked ProtonMedia CEO Ron Burns about how his company sees the virtual meetings landscape changing as Windows 7 and other software tools gain a larger enterprise profile.

The Industry Standard: How does the current version of ProtoSphere integrate with SharePoint and other enterprise collaboration tools?

Ron Burns: Among the several collaboration tools available in ProtoSphere, SharePoint is our newest, and it may at this point be the most pervasive tool already available in enterprise infrastructure worldwide. Teams can securely bring content from their company's SharePoint infrastructure into ProtoSphere's 3-D world through the use of our Media Carousel functionality. Once there, the virtual teams can share the documents with each other, edit, modify, change, and write the content back to their SharePoint infrastructure. The Media Carousels support any file type that can be added to a SharePoint site such as MS Office document and media files such as audio and video. All uploads from the users to ProtoSphere are fully encrypted, and those assets are then passed to SharePoint through the use of single sign-on. Any document changes/additions that are performed solely through SharePoint are automatically updated for those users who are in the environment.

As far as other collaboration tools, ProtoSphere integrates various social networking and knowledge sharing tools that most employees have become used to over the last couple years. Blogs, wikis and other tools allow users to engage information and each other at a higher level in engaging virtual environments.

TIS: How will new features in Windows 7 or its SharePoint connections change enterprise collaboration, and what opportunities do you see for virtual environments like yours?

Burns: Enterprise adoption of Windows 7 is as important a measure of success as any other. Windows 7 essentially is meeting a pent-up demand among enterprises. For several years now, ProtonMedia has been selling ProtoSphere into a large enterprise customer base. We have often seen a desire of the CIO or CTO level buyer for our product, but large legacy installation of operating systems as old as Windows 2000 have slowed adoption. ProtoSphere runs wonderfully well on Windows 7, and we see the enterprise adoption of Windows 7 to be a real opportunity for us to increase the use of enterprise virtual environments.

TIS: What other text or Web-based collaboration tools do you think have potential to improve the virtual meeting experience, either through direct integration or by being used in concert?

Burns: We've always seen the addition of blogs, wikis, and other social applications as being a valuable asset to people working within virtual environments. That's why we added those kinds of tools to ProtoSphere from the very beginning. The feedback we've received from customers is that social networking tools such as these enhance the user experience and level of engagement inside a virtual environment like ProtoSphere. They allow for a level of persistence and continuous exchange of knowledge within the space .... For example, if a series of events held in the environment are centered around a particular topic, users are able to share their own relevant knowledge with each other in a persistent way, that goes beyond those time bound events. ProtoSphere is becoming a convergent space, that securely links both behind the firewall enterprise applications, and internet applications that offer the enterprise user additional functionality. 

Video: Basic navigation in ProtoSphere 

Sources and research: Emails with Ron Burns and