Magor Communications, a leading supplier of visual collaboration solutions, today announced two enhancements to its HDWorkPlace family of Magor TeleCollaboration solutions: the extension of visual collaboration capabilities to remote/mobile workers and support for desktop virtualization. Both enhancements help organizations increase productivity and improve decision making by enabling easy, ad hoc access to subject matter experts and critical information resources.

Mobile support

With the introduction of HTML5, the latest HyperText Markup Language specification, delivery of rich media content via web browsers is much more efficient. Magor TeleCollaboration has leveraged HTML5 and its Canvas feature to provide a new ‘any device, any browser’ capability that allows any smartphone or tablet user to access a Magor TeleCollaboration session via any browser.

By simply pointing a browser to a Magor TeleCollaboration session webserver, mobile users can selectively choose to view multiple, concurrent collaboration materials or desktops that have been shared in the session. There is no need to download any plug-ins or add-ons.

Magor will deliver further enhancements for mobile workers in Q2 2011:

• Unicast streaming of any video stream within a Magor TeleCollaboration session. With this development, mobile workers will be able to select which video streams they want to watch during a visual collaboration session, in addition to the shared collaboration materials.
• Point-to-point, two-way video calling from any smartphone, tablet, desktop PC or laptop that has a Skype video client to a Magor endpoint. With this enhancement, mobile workers will be able to show themselves to other participants in a session or point their cameras at something that others need to see.

Virtualization

With the adoption of virtualization among a broad range of industries and the difficultly of predicting what form today’s desktop will take over the next few years (PC, tablet, smartphone, something else), Magor has extended its support of desktop collaboration resources. In addition to PC, Mac, Solaris and Unix-based resources, Magor now supports Linux-based Citrix and VMware virtual desktop clients natively on any Magor TeleCollaboration endpoint, therefore enabling participants in a visual collaboration session to access and share a wider range of virtual desktops.

With this enhancement, Magor TeleCollaboration users can now easily gain access to important information during a session by simply logging in to a virtualized server and pulling up their desktops – eliminating the need to drag a laptop to a meeting room. Rather than having to pre-plan all the materials that might be needed during a meeting, or having to reschedule a meeting in order to gather additional materials, a Magor TeleCollaboration user can simply access whatever information he needs quickly, easily and conveniently.

“As described within our recent report on this topic, we have noted increased interest in supporting high quality videoconferencing in VDI environments,” said Ira M. Weinstein, analyst and partner at Wainhouse Research. “Magor has developed a unique approach to adding VDI to a visual collaboration endpoint, one that maintains the face-to-face video experience while providing convenient access to PC-based content.”

“In developing these mobile support and virtualization enhancements, it was important for us to follow our guiding philosophy of letting the end user control his own visual collaboration experience,” said Ken Davison, vice president of marketing for Magor Communications. “This approach helps ensure high utility of our visual collaboration solutions among both office-based and mobile workers.”