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Airlines have given customers the ability to easily change and rebook flights from their PCs, laptops and smartphones. In another whelm, Glowpoint has allowed a similar user-friendly functionality for booking telepresence and video conference rooms and sessions, making travel alternatives easier to use and more popular as a result, leading to less need to book air travel.

 

Glowpoint’s new ScheduleSync synchronizes customer desktop calendaring and scheduling software with its customer Web portal. ScheduleSync integrates with Microsoft (News - Alert) Exchange and provides what Glowpoint said is “a natural experience for customers to schedule and manage telepresence and video conferences from their desktop computers.”

 

ScheduleSync is a downloadable application that resides, and is configured, on organizations’ Microsoft Exchange servers. It automatically helps end-users analyze free/busy status for prospective telepresence and video conference meetings and attendees, schedule such meetings, and make changes to reservations. It can have video sessions launch automatically and directly from their PCs.

 

“Traditionally, meeting coordinators would use our customer web portal or contact our Video Network Operations Center reservationists via telephone,” said Glowpoint (News - Alert) Director of Product Management Howard Reingold, in a statement. “Now, customers can see the availability of meeting rooms, video systems, and participants, and schedule directly from their Microsoft Outlook desktop calendaring function. The process is seamless and is a significant benefit to customers, and it allows organizations to use their existing business calendaring application to easily integrate our VNOC managed service into their user community.”

 

With ScheduleSync, users can schedule their meetings and select participants, participant resources, conference rooms and telepresence and video rooms, as listed resources in their Microsoft Outlook calendars. In addition, installation is done exclusively on the enterprise side; no desktop plug-ins are required.

 

What’s more, ScheduleSync keeps all systems synchronized as modifications are made. Standard notifications are automatically sent within the native Microsoft Exchange platform to all participants. It features a simple to use, built-in free/busy viewing to schedule and provides the required details for the meeting to automatically launch the video call at the requested meeting time.

 

The application offers authenticated and secure communication the customer site to the Web portal is and it requires little or no modification to corporate firewalls. ScheduleSync is also compatible with all major telepresence and video conferencing environments, such as Cisco, Polycom and TANDBERG.

 

 “A key component to driving the adoption of video is making it easy to use,” said Glowpoint President and Co-CEO Joe Laezza (News - Alert). “ScheduleSync, as a feature of the Glowpoint customer web portal, is consistent with our ‘in the cloud’ managed service approach, that makes the management of telepresence and video effortless for the end user and is designed to help drive global adoption of video as a key component in the unified communications mix.”