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Finding a street address at night can be difficult enough.
But imagine trying to find the address if every house used a different system.
Searching, finding and assigning addresses goes on with videoconferencing, too. But in many cases the companies and individuals involved are using different equipment and incompatible audio, video and messaging protocols.
If an employee in Texas wants to link up with her boss in New York over the desk-to-desk videoconference system, computers and software in both states need to work together. Without a standard, experts say, the video from one end may just search aimlessly around for the computer on the other end of the line.
That's why some academics and tech groups put their heads together and, in recent weeks, announced a new standard designed to make videoconferencing as easy as finding a house on a one-house block.
The standard is not a typical protocol, but rather a directory service architecture offering a uniform way to store and find online information related to various video and voice-over-Internet protocols. The standard is intended to bridge the gaps among different vendors
and brands of equipment, and between new and old methods of videoconferencing.
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