Licensing Change Drives Live Meeting Users To Look Beyond Microsoft

This article is an updated version of the document published on 17 April 2008

When Microsoft introduced Live Meeting 2007 (the latest version of its flagship Web conferencing product) last year, it dropped the concurrent user licensing option. According to Microsoft, this move is justifiable because it brings Live Meeting into line with the licensing policies for other products under the Office brand. The licensing models offered by Microsoft are now significantly more expensive for some configurations and harder to manage.
The concurrent user option is popular in companies with large numbers of occasional users. These users might attend one or two meetings a year — for training or management presentations, for example. Having to license each named user can be significantly more expensive, and requires a great deal more administration to keep track of users who join and leave the company, as well as the total number of licenses already purchased. Those issues has been enough to make some companies look elsewhere.
Microsoft suggests that users in this situation buy one-off "event" licenses, or pay per-minute/per-user charges for specific meetings.
So far, Microsoft has held firm on its new licensing policy, despite dissatisfaction and defections among its users. It is believed that if enough users defect to alternatives because of the policy, Microsoft will eventually introduce more amenable schemes. In the meantime, large organizations whose Live Meeting licenses are up for renewal should be prepared to look beyond Microsoft to support their Web conferencing requirements for occasional users.