The authors detail how the proliferation of IP networks has driven quality improvements and cost savings in video, and has forced service providers and equipment vendors to pay more than just lip service to their ability to deliver video. Case studies demonstrate how businesses enable communications via videoconferences with broadcast quality reception.

Designed to help readers understand all aspects of videoconferencing, this guide touches on hardware and software, selecting and accessing videoconferencing networks, developing a request for proposals, and operational and business considerations for videoconferencing. New to this edition are expanded coverage of standards and a security section.

Case studies document how, in businesses all across this country, people are communicating via videoconferences with broadcast quality reception. The authors detail how the proliferation of IP networks has driven quality improvements and cost savings in

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor and Francis, an informa company.

The fourth novel in 4th Estate's Wilcox revival, a revival which has been received with universal enthusiasm: 'With a keen eye for the weirdness of ordinary lives and an easy style somewhere between Armistead Maupin and Ann Tyler, Wilcox looks set for similar success.' GQ Gretchen Peabody, fortyish and only just a bit dowdy, has decided to abandon the comforts of Manhattan for a new home in Tula Springs, Louisiana, having been swept off her feet by Frank Dambar, a fetching widower she has happened upon in a New Orleans souvenir shop. What she finds there, however, is a state of affairs to which only James Wilcox could do justice. While Gretchen is baffled by the small town's provincialism, it pales next to the weird household her new husband has assembled, which includes a handyman/mystic and his arthritic niece, and a stolid Teutonic housekeeper determined to keep the first Mrs Dambar's memory alive. Just as Gretchen begins to wonder whether so unusual a marriage has been a mistake, fate again intrudes... Wilcox's brilliantly comic vision is matched by a profoundly affecting regard for his characters - qualities that mark his maturity as a novelist and confirm his standing among the classic American humorists.

No scandal has ever rocked Tula Springs, Louisiana, like the discovery one morning of a dead body sprawled beneath L. D. Loraine?s window. No matter that L.D. is 91 and nearly bedridden ? the evidence clearly points to him as the murderer of the nasty Mr Versey, his lackadaisical home attendant. Before justice can be done however half the staff of City Hall, a suspicious old curmudgeon of a judge, a home ec teacher, an uninspired dentist, the principal of a disreputable school, several adulterous housewives and even Miss Undine?s living room are implicated? Standing firmly and stubbornly at the centre of the action is the great niece of the accused, Olive Mackie. Outraged on learning that she too has been drawn into the case she decides that desperate action is called for and heads out to restore her reputation and to singlehandedly set things straight in the beleaguered town.

Mr Norris wants everyone to know that he is gay. The problem is, no one will believe him. His position isn't helped by the fact that he is living with his ex-wife and that he has never had sex with a man. Plain and Normal is James Wilcox's long awaited new novel. In his funniest novel yet, James Wilcox introduces us to a Mr Norris, a man who just wants his life to be plain and normal. Everything will be much easier if everyone is clear about who he is. That he is gay, for example. But unfortuantely life isn't that easy and people will keep on drawing the wrong conclusions. In this hilarious new novel Mr Norris gets in deeper and deeper. Only Mr Norris could go to a gay club on the wrong night, and, being too polite to leave, get into conversation with a homophobic lorry driver called Rocco. But then no one in this novel is as plain or as normal as they seem.

An astute and comical dissection of the culture wars-by the author of the much-loved "Modern Baptists"
For More Than twenty years, James Wilcox has been cherished by reviewers and readers alike as one of the most talented American humorists. Since his classic "Modern Baptists" (picked by Harold Bloom as one of the few contemporary novels in his Western Canon), Wilcox has been charting the intricate spiritual topography of the South with inimitable wit and empathy. His "real comic genius" (Anne Tyler, "The New York Times Book Review") has never been so brilliantly deployed as in this hilarious look at the peculiarly American cultural divisions of our times.

This is a true story, of a poor boy, that was born and raised on the Island of Cedar Key, Florida.The exciting life of Jimmy Bishop, was born and raised on the Island Cedar Key, Florida. At the time I was growing up, I knew every person on the Island, from the youngest to the oldest, and I loved them all. The Town of Cedar Key is not the Island; The town of Cedar Key, are the people that live on the Island. Cedar Key, is not Heaven, but if you look through the kitchen window you can almost see it. My opinion is, the people who live on the Island of Cedar Key, are living on the Island Paradise Of America. The year, 1995, I bought myself a computer. After purchasing it I connected everything together. I didn't know anything about Computer's. I couldn't type, which made it difficult for me to use the computer. When I was in high school typing was not offered, because our high school had burned and all the type writers burned too. I decided to purchase a soft ware program that taught typing. After installing it to my computer I proceeded to learn how to type. The first thing that it taught was the location of the keys, qwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm etc. It looked hard, but it wasn't long before I had learned how to type. After learning how to type, I began thinking about writing my life history. I thought it over, and as I was thinking about my past life I came to the conclusion that I have a unique life behind me, and it was worth telling the whole world about how great my life is, "and how blessed I am," to have lived an exciting life as mine, and lived to tell about it.

Universally and repeatedly praised ever since it first appeared in 1983, Modern Baptists is the book that launched novelist James Wilcox's career and debuted the endearingly daft community of Tula Springs, Louisiana. It's the tale of Bobby Pickens, assistant manager of Sonny Boy Bargain Store, who gains a new lease on life, though he almost comes to regret it. Bobby's handsome half brother F.X. -- ex-con, ex-actor, and ex-husband three times over -- moves in, and things go awry all over town. Mistaken identities; entangled romances with Burma, Toinette, and Donna Lee; assault and battery; charges of degeneracy; a nervous breakdown -- it all comes to a head at a Christmas Eve party in a cabin on a poisoned swamp. This is sly, madcap romp that offers readers the gift of abundant laughter.

Modern Baptists was included in Harold Bloom's The Western Canon, in GQ magazine's forty-fifth anniversary issue as one of the best works of fiction in the past forty-five years, and among Toni Morrison's "favorite works by unsung writers" in U.S. News and World Report.

A candidate for the office of Superintendent of Streets, Parks, and Garbage, middle-aged matron Olive Mackie of Tula Springs, Louisiana, finds her political aspirations thwarted when her ninety-one-year-old Great Uncle L.D. comes under suspicion for murder. Police don't believe that L.D.'s home-care attendant would commit suicide by jumping from a second-floor window -- but Olive, who has heard her uncle demonstrate his excellent memory by reciting important dates in history over and over, thinks he would. Before justice can be done, half the staff of City Hall, a home ec teacher, an uninspired dentist, the principal of a disreputable private school, and several adulterous housewives are implicated in James Wilcox's spectacular plot. His third Tula Springs novel, Miss Undine's Living Room is not only a masterful comedy, exuberant and irreverent, but also a deeply felt examination of the education of the mind and the spirit.

With the recent publication of Plain and Normal, James Wilcox's first book in five years ... with Back Bay's fall 1998 release of a new trade paperback edition of Wilcox's comic masterpiece, Modern Baptists (which Anne Tyler hailed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, which Toni Morrison counts as one of her favorite books by unsung writers, which Harold Bloom has elected to the canon of enduring twentieth-century American literature) ... and now with this new trade paperback edition of Wilcox's highly acclaimed Polite Sex, the story of two young women from Tula Springs, Louisiana, who seek fame and fortune in New York City ...readers everywhere are discovering the special pleasures of Wilcox's tender and hilarious comic fiction.

Lloyd Norris is slouching towards middle age. Recently out of the closet, he knows it's time to devote himself to finding the love & companionship that have long eluded him. But his search is complicated & the result is a dizzyingly funny book about the awesome power of our need for connection.