Ad-hoc / impromptu 8 person conference call fun with Office Communicator 2007 and Office Communications Server 2007

It looks like a typical group chat session, but what makes it interesting is everything you can't see from a simple screenshot.

This OCS 2007 session started as a two person "Hey, is this working?" voice chat that blossomed into a full blown eight person ad-hoc video conference call.

If you happened to be online while we were testing out the external audio/video functionality, you were most likely targeted by us with a 'drive-by' chat invite.

More people were added in by simply dragging and dropping their name into the chat window. They had to accept the "call", of course, but once they did, they were added to the conversation.

People were talking at various points into their microphones on their laptops and the audio was as if you were on a landline telephone, but with better quality and low bandwidth use due to advanced codecs.

One of us fired up their webcam, so it morphed into a video conference.

A PowerPoint document was dragged and dropped into the chat window and it displayed like it would inside PowerPoint. The same thing happened with a movie file. People started sharing applications from their desktop.

Most people were at home or in a hotel on varying types of network connections (Cable, DSL) behind firewalls of various makes and models.

A few people were in coffee shops using their cell phone for internet connectivity.

Most importantly, VPNs were not needed or used. It all just worked without any end user configuration, outside of adjusting microphone volume.

It was quite a 'geek' moment. I love technology like this!

Update: Very strange timing on this, but it looks like some people inside Microsoft were doing the same type of experiment recently, as noted here.