Video Conferencing experts Lifesize have become one of the few qualified to integrate into Microsoft Office Communication server 2007. Microsoft OCScustomers will now be able to utilise video conferencing during their meetings all in HD.

Which products are supported?

Not all Lifesize products can currently be integrated into Microsoft OCS and similarly not all versions of Microsoft OCS will support Lifesize products although the major versions of Microsoft OCS are supported. The list below shows which versions of Microsoft OCS are supported by Lifesize products:

• Microsoft Office Communication Server 2007 R1 (v3.0.6362.0)
• Microsoft Office Communication Server 2007 R2 (v3.5.6907.0)
• Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R1 (v2.0.6362.0)
• Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2 (v3.5.6907.0)

To date only the Lifesize Team 220 range of video conferencing products are supported but Lifesize are mentioned their intention to bring support to their whole range of video conferencing products.

What features will it include?

The integration will bring a unified contacts list adding Lifesize and Microsoft OCS contacts into one, easily manageable list. In addition to this, it will bring additional security features such as the ability to authenticate and encrypt data for secure communication as well as incorporating Microsoft Edge to bring a high end Firewall/NAT traversal service.

Standard definition video conferencing will be supported via the H.263 and G.711 video and audio codes and HD video conferencing will be supported via the H.264 and AAC-LC video and audio codes.

What does the future hold?

Lifesize are currently working on introducing compatibility with other Microsoft products and in particular with Microsoft Lync Server 2010 (RTM). Interoperability with this product is expected to arrive some time during the back end of this year which means we will no doubt be hearing more from these two companies soon.

We are starting a new weekly series whereby we will listdown "5 bests" from the tech world. You will find great plugins, extensions, customizations, tips, tricks, etc. in this series. For week 1, we have some great Google Chrome extensions that you’d love to try out.

1. Stay Focusd

So you’ve decided you will never visit that website (read, Facebook again! But 5 minutes later, you find yourself happily browsing it. Stay Focusd will be your nanny and help you stay focused on your work. Stay Focusd limits the amount of time you spend on time-wasting websites like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc.

2. Turn off the lights

A very cool extension that darkens other elements of the page when a video is played. This gives a nice theatre feel.

3. Unfriend Finder for Facebook

A much anticipated feature but sadly Facebook doesn’t offer it natively. However, this cool extension will notify you if your friend remove you from their friendlist, block you or deactivate their profiles.

4. Panic Button

You browse your favorite sites during office hours. Yes, you do. But when your boss enters, you either close each tab one by one (quite time consuming!) or the browser itself. You are in the middle of the conversation with someone and boom! you are disconnected. Panic Button is a nifty little extension that simply hides all your tabs at once, with a single click. It hides them, not close them. You can restore them later when the coast is clear.

5. Snippy

A great productivity tool. With Snippy you can take snippets of interesting information, be it text or images and edit them, save them for future use and share them too. You can also add comments to your saved snippets.

Recently Skype went down and with it, a lot of vchat addicts went through hours of frustration. Skype has certainly gone mainstream and it’s the first thing that strikes one’s head when it comes to video chat. Well, very few of us do know that there are some great alternatives to Skype. Based on performance and stability, we have listed the 4 best that come at par with Skype itself.

ooVoo

ooVoo is a free video chat solution that offers video sharing for upto 4 users simultaneously. Simply download and install the software, import your contacts from your email and social network accounts and your are good to go. You can even chat with people who do not have the software installed using the browser-based applet.

TinyChat

TinyChat is a browser-based video chat solution where you can connect with upto 12 users (including you) simultaneously. There is nothing to install so that’s a plus.

FaceFlow

FaceFlow is a relatively new service and is still in a beta but is quite decent. It offers free, browser based video chat with upto 3 users along with features like photo sharing, file sharing, games, full screen mode and ability to stay anonymous.

TokBox

Tokbox offers video chat to upto 20 participants in a single call. You can import contacts from Gmail, Yahoo, Facebook, etc. Sharing YouTube videos within the interface might appeal to many. You can invite more people to join the video chat by promoting your call URL to your Facebook friends and Twitter followers.

Chrome 6 has been released with some great new features like form autofill, Extension Sync, support for WebM videos and (bet you didn’t know this) a built-in PDF viewer! Yes, it does mean a lot to serious professionals. But it’s not enabled by default. So here’s how you get it working:

In the address-bar, type ‘chrome://plugins/‘ and press ‘Enter’.

Here, simply click ‘Enable’ link in the Chrome PDF Viewer entry.

With the new default PDF viewer, it’s now irrelevant to have an Adobe Reader installed on your computer for viewing PDF files online.

This probably shouldn’t need an intro paragraph. What else can be more straightforward than 3 beautifully minimalistic, web-based notepad applications that lets you write (and sync and save) random pieces of text on the go? Today we feature 3 web-based notepad applications that’ll prove to be very useful.

SimpleText.ws

I just fell in love with SimpleText at first sight. Clean, distraction-free UI. You can log in using your Google account, write as many text documents and save them. You can access your text files from anywhere.

Gist.Github

Next up, Gist.Github. If you are a developer, you might want to go for this one. It can detect the programming language based on the filename you provide. Store and share snippets of code easily.

Notepad.cc

Notepad.cc – the most minimalist of ‘em all. All you see is big white block and tiny links at the bottom to change sharing URL of the text file and to add password security. If you want to share some paragraphs or a poetry on Twitter or Facebook, I’d day use this one and share the URL.

So you are a high profile secret agent and need to send a really secure email to your party ;), you might want to try OneTimeMessage – a web-service that lets you send self-destructing emails to your friends.

There is no sign-up required. Just put in your and the recipient’s name and email address, write your secret message and send it. You might want to set additional options to send you a message when your email is read and when to destroy the message in case it remains unread.

The system then gives you a ‘key’ which you need to send to the recipient by any means of communication. Once the recipient reads the message, it destroys itself automatically within 5 minutes. I have used it and it’s really great.

Go to OneTimeMessage

Few hours ago Google launched a tool to convert the script of any webpage into your desired language script. Google learnt that many people know a language but cannot read the script in which it is written. For example you might be knowing Hindi but does not know how to comprehend the ‘Devnagri’ script. In such a case, you can use Google’s ‘Script Converter’ to transliterate (convert to a phonetic equivalent) the text on any webpage into your preferred language script.

Script Converter currently supports inter-transliteration between 17 languages: Bengali, English, Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.

The tool is good for casual transliteration purposes but must not be used solely if you wish to learn a certain language script. It still needs to be tweaked on a large scale; especially for Indic scripts.

Google Script Converter

Sometime ago we showed you how you can get real-time notifications on your desktop when your website is viewed by someone. Today we feature another such analytics tool that gives you an idea about how visitors actually surf your website by recording their every gesture.

GhostRec is an online web analytics service that essentially records mouse movements and clicks done by your visitors and stores it as a video which you can playback later. Hence you can precisely observe how a visitor deals with your site, what interests her, how much time she takes reading your content, how she browses your web-pages, etc.

Upon registering a free account, you’ll have to copy-paste their code into your site’s HTML which will record the mouse gestures of your visitors. You get 30 free recordings. If you need more, you’ll have to buy them. So it’s not a free product. But the pricing is very decent. Plans start from $1.95 for 100 recordings to $32.95 for 2300.

I say even 100 recordings are more than enough unless you have an online empire. You need just samples here, right? You need know the pattern of how a visitor perceives your site. And for that, 100 samples are enough to give you the idea.

All in all, a very nice service. You must try it out yourself.

Go to GhostRec

Spelling check is one of the most boring yet important task in publishing. Online publishers and blog writers will agree that no matter how much care you take while writing a post, you are not 100% sure that your content is error free. And what’s worse is that you are simply unaware of your silly mistakes. Here’s something that can help online publishers to spot spelling errors on their websites and blogs.

Spellr.us is a web-based app that detects site-wide spelling errors within a minute. You just need to feed in your website’s / blog’s URL and it takes care of the rest.

The app lists out errors in three categories: likely, unlikely and possible. And the best part is, as I mentioned above, Spellr.us checks the entire website / blog for errors.

Enough said, I know you are looking for the link

Check Spellr.us now

As far as I remember, Opera was among the pioneers in web browser portability. They’ve been releasing a portable version of their browser for over a half decade. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise when it releases a portable version of its latest – The 10.5. Opera claims version 10.5 to be the fastest browser till date and increasing number of users are affirming it.

The portable version will let you carry the fastest browser in your flash drive wherever you go. Needless to say, you needn’t install anything. Just plug-in your USB pen drive equipped with Opera 10.5 Portable and start browsing. The portable version of Opera 10.5 is also much secured considering the fact that it won’t leave traces and/or make any changes to the registry on the host computer. So just don’t wait. Click the link below to download the portable version of Opera 10.5

Download Opera 10.5 Portable version