Microsoft updates videoconferencing

Microsoft Corp., the world's largest software maker, will begin selling a new version of the company's corporate videoconferencing service and will provide an update to an instant-messaging program for businesses.

The instant-messaging update, an addition to the Live Communications Server 2005 program released in December, lets corporate workers quickly exchange short e-mails with users of similar programs from Time Warner Inc.'s America Online, Yahoo! Inc. and Microsoft's own MSN, the company said Tuesday in a statement.

Microsoft created a unit as part of its Office division in 2003 to sell programs that let workers better communicate using phones, computer teleconferences and instant messaging in a bid to boost sales of its Office software.

By designing the programs to work with corporate-network and word-processing and spreadsheet products, Microsoft hopes to sell more copies of Office.

"The value for Microsoft is that this represents an entirely new software category," said Paul DeGroot, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft.

The programs were announced Tuesday in a speech by Microsoft chairman Bill Gates in San Francisco.

Microsoft Office Communicator 2005, the program that lets workers control telephone calls using computers and conduct instant-message conversations and videoconferences, is planned for release in the next 90 days, the company, based in Redmond, Wash., said in a statement.

"We're really getting to this vision of people having the information they care about when they want it," Gates said in his speech. "The capabilities are just going to get richer and richer."

Gates demonstrated the products by holding a teleconference with Mark Burnett, creator of the NBC television show "The Apprentice," in which contestants compete for a job with Donald Trump. Gates and Burnett brainstormed ideas for contestant challenges for next season.

The telephone program includes functions from a prototype that Gates first showed in May 2003. It allows employees to answer and forward regular phone calls with a click of a computer mouse. The prototype has been in use throughout Microsoft.