History of Web Conferencing - Multi - function Conferencing Comes of Age (part 2)

PLATO’s descendants

In the late 1970’s, Ray Ozzie and Tim Halvorsen worked at CERL. Years later they took some of the features of PLATO and greatly expanded on their capabilities when designing one of today’s most powerful web conferencing tools -- Lotus Notes, released in 1989.

Lotus Notes was the first commercially released product that really took off to offer user-created data-bases, document sharing, and remote location communication under one umbrella. It created a “relationship based” environment that took the corporation world by storm.

Other descendants of PLATO included DEC Notes, originally known as VAX, written by Len Kawell. It is still used today on DEC’s EASYnet and on Starlink, a universal web conferencing community. NetNotes is a client-server system designed to improve on the original DEC Notes, with WebNotes as an add-on for World Wide Web access.

True WEB conferencing

The distinction between true web conferencing and systems conferencing is difficult, however, to define. When the Web first became a contender as a valid means of collaborative conferencing with document sharing, etc, many companies took conferencing packages originally designed for intranet systems and redesigned them. The results weren’t always seamless. It wasn’t until the mid-1990’s that true Web Conferencing software that was reliable was available.

PLATO and other main-frame based conferencing systems were based on a centralized structure, with all elements feeding into a central computer. This structure saw the development of several types of conferencing software that included Backtalk, Caucus, COW, Motet, Web Crossing, Podium, TALKaway and YAPP.

PlaceWare, arguably one of the most influential Web conferencing systems developed, had interesting origins in the 1990’s at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, where it began as a multi-user game called LambdaMOO. PlaceWare was one of the first companies to provide complete Web conferencing after the initial release of PlaceWare Auditorium in 1997. In April of 2003, Microsoft purchased PlaceWare, adding it to its newly formed Real-Time Collaborative Business Unit.

P2P shifts the focus of web conferencing

Another popular form of software was Groupware, essentially defined by Lotus Notes. The difference between the centralized structure of PLATO-based systems and Lotus is in the additional functions -- Lotus provided a host of other options like scheduling and document sharing. Groupware software is more complex than Centralized software and focus on work flow; that is, making sure documents, graphics and templates are where they need to be. Popular Groupware products developed in the 1990’s included InTandem, Livelink, Lotus Domino, Oracle InterOffice, TEAMate and WebShare.

As the price of home computers dropped, peer to peer (P2P) file sharing became more and more commonplace over the World Wide Web, although primarily on a user to user basis. That changed when members of Napster, then an illegal, informally organized group of college youth and other music-lovers, began sharing millions of music files among themselves. It began a revolution in the use of the Internet that changes the way Web conferencing was eventually perceived. P2P began to be seen as the way to host Web conferencing, rather than through a single server. .

Groove took this peer to peer concept and applied it to Web conferencing. The Groove technology, originally released in 2000, was upgraded to real performance power with Groove 2.1 in 2002 and was impressive. The advantages of peer to peer were immediately obvious -- once you loaded the software and were set up, you never had to pay a subscription or user fee for an offsite server to store any files, you will never lose all files in one central location, and you are set up and good to go for life (or until the next upgrade, at least).

Another company that recognized the need for quality Web conferencing software during these years was WiredRed Software, founded in 1998. In 2003, they released e/pop, a real-time Web Conferencing suite with comprehensive features for all aspects of industry -- it was the first installable web conferencing software with no significant install time.

NextPage also offers P2P web conferencing and document sharing capabilities developed out of the Napster movement. In fact, they use the example of Napster file sharing and downloads to illustrate to companies the advantages of using a peer to peer network over a centralized server.