The Halloween candy is thinning out, long gone are the Reese’s and Snickers, only the Mike ‘n Ikes and rock hard Tootsie Rolls remain.  It’s now time to turn our attention to the fancy December holidays like Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa.  What? I forgot Thanksgiving, yeah well apparently so did the rest of country.  Everywhere I turn colored lights are going up and trees are being decorated, but it seems that Thanksgiving only serves as a reminder that we need to start hitting the stores.  

While turkey day may be the amuse-bouche of the holiday season, it deserves some attention.  As you start to devour a plate of food that could feed a small third world country village for a month, take a moment to look around and appreciate the greatest aspect of the Thanksgiving holiday…the rare four-day weekend!  That’s right, after the big meal, you still have 3 more days to fight the crowds at the mall and argue with your relatives. 

Annoying relatives and rage-inducing crowds aside, Thanksgiving is a time to gather, a time to meet, a time to reconnect, a time to use your Genesys Meeting Center account, (like how I snuck that segue way in there) Genesys is truly a global company, and in my department we have employees from Poland, Argentina, Sweden, UK, and Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, (I’ll give yinz one guess who’s from PA.)  While our holiday travels take us around the world, we can still keep in touch and collaborate on projects with just a few clicks. 

Whether you use it to catch up on business, or to contact distant relatives, your Genesys Meeting Center account is always available to you anytime from anywhere. So pass the Swedish meatballs, Polish sausage, bangers and mash, Argentinean beef and enjoy the long weekend.  Bon Appétit!

Happy Thanksgiving from everyone at Genesys!

Erik Crawford – Web Marketing Manager

I’d like to further explain some details about our upcoming Genesys Meeting Center 4.03 release, scheduled for the end of November. We’re really excited to make several new features available to our customers as they all make Genesys Meeting Center even easier to use.

Probably the coolest new feature is the ability for any shared presentation or application to be automatically scaled to fit the participant’s screen. Participants will also have the option to easily scale in and out with a neat little magnifying glass icon.
As Erik mentioned, this release also includes integration support for the Lotus Notes IM client. Users will be able to easily and quickly invite Lotus Notes users via their IM buddy lists.

Improvements to the user interface include a simple tool to dial out to additional participants via the “basic” view option as well as the ability to set notification tone control directly from the interface. With this feature, moderators will have the ability (on the fly) to enable or disable entry and exit tones or to set “Name Record/Playback” as an option. This is really handy for knowing who is in your meeting as well as who is trying to sneak out early.

For our Asian customers, the initial login interface will support Japanese and the two major versions of Chinese (Traditional and Simplified).

And lastly, we now fully support the new Microsoft Vista OS as well as Office 2007 for any users that have taken the plunge.

Thanks and look for future updates coming soon!

Tony Terranova, VP Product Marketing, Genesys

Let’s face it point releases are about as exciting as looking at pictures of your grandparent’s bird-watching vacation.  There’s no marketing buzz, no sales hype, and the fixes are usually only relevant to the back-end functionality and maybe a couple minor changes for a few select customers.  The next Genesys point release slated for late Q4, 2007 breaks this mold and like Justin Timberlake, is bringing sexy back.

Right off the bat you have Lotus SameTime IM integration.  Hmm, should I IM my BFF Jill or launch a Genesys meeting?  I don’t know yet but I will now have the power to do both at my fingertips.  “OMG, do you like want to like collaborate on this spreadsheet?  LOL!”
 
Here’s where the sexy really comes back, from the moderator interface basic view you’ll be able to dial out to your participants from a shortcut toolbar button.  No digging through meeting options or switching to the advanced view to call out to your tardy participants.  This will save you up to 3 clicks per meeting and reduce your risk of carpal tunnel syndrome by 40%.  (statistics are based on a random number generator, found only in my head)

As if the dial out feature weren’t enough for a point release, you can enable notification tones, listen to names or have silence for participant entry, directly from the moderator interface.  Now I know what you’re thinking, surely this must be a major release, but it’s not, it’s just the sexiest point release in Genesys history.

Finally, I’d like to officially welcome users of the Microsoft Vista OS to the party.  Genesys now fully supports this platform and the complete suite of Meeting Center features are now at your disposal.  Enjoy!

Are point releases pointless?  No. In fact they can be downright exhilarating.  Well maybe not exhilarating, but better than looking at pictures of a red breasted nuthatch sitting on a fence post.

-Erik Crawford, Web Marketing Manager