Running (and Surviving) a Web-based Conference

Last updated Nov 18, 2005.

Unless you've been sleeping under a rock, you know that an abundance of web conferencing programs are available. Before broadband, larger companies used video conferencing solutions that were completely proprietary on wide area networks. Now there are many IP based solutions, including two from Microsoft:

• LiveMeeting, acquired when they purchased Placeware, which takes over from Netmeeting and SharePoint Services (another collaboration tool).
• Microsoft also recently acquired Groove, a collaboration tool that presumably will be phased into the next version of Microsoft Office.

In this space, Webex is still the biggest player. My guess that it is being quickly chased by GoToMeeting, which was recently acquired by Citrix. I recently watched a GoToMeeting demo, which shared the desktop efficiently; and everything worked.

I can't really say as much for some of the other conferences I have attended. A lot of the problems seem to have to do with relying upon various Java applications along with Internet Explorer.

Before I go into my own recent experience in actually running a conference, let me mention some other players in this space:

• Macromedia Breeze: a complete publishing solution that works with its own proprietary video format, FLV.
• Conferral: A competitor with collaboration features.
• Raindance: A conferencing tool widely used, and recently reviewed by PC Magazine.

There are scores of others. In a way, I could include Microsoft OneNote, which I've written about before; a collaborative OneNote session is available as part of the program.

My First Webinar

As those of you who have read the Introductions to my weekly updates know, I recently did a "webinar" on how to use video in PowerPoint.

The host for this program was the Presentations Council of InfoComm International, of which I am a proud member. The council puts on monthly web conferences as an educational event for its members, actual and prospective.

The program that InfoComm uses for its web conferences is Genesys, so that is the tool I needed to use. Like most of these conferencing tools, Genesys opens a virtual "Meeting Center," constructing a virtual online meeting into which the participants can log in from an email invitation.

There are two main options for audio. You can use your computer speakers as part of the meeting. Or, the more user friendly option, you can use a conference call service into which the participants phone in – which is what we did.

But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself. A couple of days prior to the actual event, I did a mock test of the meeting center to see how my presentation would work.

There are a few ways to set up something like this. Probably the easiest of them is to load up a set of PowerPoint slides into the application, and show them. Another way, great for training, is to have several applications open; and then toggle between shared applications.

The third technique, which I opted for, is to share your entire desktop, so that the audience sees whatever is on top.

Theoretically, this is great because it allows you to work "normally." As we'll see, however, there are issues.

I ran a Java test prior to logging in to the test meeting, fine-tuned my browser (IE), and was greeted by the moderator. The next step was getting control from the moderator, which she did in the Genesys system.

The glitch occurred when we tried to have me share my desktop. It took a call to the very helpful Genesys tech support team to discover the problem: blocked popups. For the shared desktop to work, I had to turn off two popup blockers, one in IE and the other in my Yahoo toolbar.

After that, I saw all of my running applications under a Shared tab, and activated share for my desktop. I was off and running... Almost.

Remember my topic is using video effectively. So I had a nice 640x480 video in my first slide. I tried to play it. It played fine on my computer, but the two folks in the meeting center only saw a black square!

This brings up an obvious issue. You are transmitting lots of screen information in real time. The network can't keep up with full frame video of that size. That's why most web cams, even on broadband, are small windows at low frame rates.

I was also counseled to change my screen resolution down to 800x600 for the conference, so that again less information needed to be updated per second.

But the stuff worked. So I was ready to go. I logged in forty minutes early and was introduced by the host. You can view the presentation here.

Figure 773

So when I was introduced I already had the moderator controls, but the attendees where told to put their phones on mute.

I didn't realize it at the time, but this is scary. You're literally cut off from the audience.

In addition, although I passed over the video in the first slide, knowing that it wouldn't play very well for the attendees to see, I quickly realized as I went through my slides that I had another problem: I couldn't see what my audience was seeing.

Working on a local machine, everything ran great. But I was blithely hyperlinking to other presentations and opening other programs for demos on my desktop. I immediately thought about slowing down, which I did, but I was totally cut off.

This was partially my own fault. I should have had attendees unmute their phones to provide feedback.

Another potential feedback channel was the Chat window. Along with a Whiteboard, Chat is part of most conferencing programs. But having opted to share my desktop and go full screen, my chat window was obscured.

In hindsight, what I should have done, was logged in separately as an attendee using my laptop. Then, with my laptop beside me, I would have had a real-time view of what my attendees were seeing. I highly recommend this for any of you who are going to do videoconferencing in the future.

Only now, having watched the archived version on the web, do I see that my hyperlinks actually worked – including one where I showed another PowerPoint slide with five small videos.

Figure 774

Again, I did not play the videos, although the small screen versions probably would have played, albeit with dropped frames and unsynched lips.

At the end of the conference I stopped for questions, and as phones were unmuted, there were very few. True, I had presented a load of technical material which seemed to have overwhelmed my audience. But unlike a live presenter, I had no faces to read or body language to evaluate. I was out there in web space. Finally, some questions were articulated, and the conference concluded.

What I want to stress is that you need to minimize this feeling of isolation. The muted phone thing may be necessary in some situations (with a hostile audience), but combined with the obscured chat window, it makes it hard to pace the presentation and know how it is being received.

Each conferencing tool is different. However, the chat and audio channels (phone conferencing) are common threads. Make sure you have them in place before setting up a conference.

Finally, if you are venturing into the web conferencing space, you owe it to yourself to visit the site of the acknowledged guru -- Robin Good. His site, Master New Media, has probably the most up-to-date information and reviews of all conferencing solutions, along with related information on podcasting and royalty free images.

Of course, in the final analysis, like anything else the only way to learn it is to do it – which is why I wanted to do my first webinar with the Presentations Council.

Next time, I will know how to turn off my popups, set up a laptop monitor to show me what the audience sees, and make sure that my connection with the audience is never severed.

But for the first attempt, it was very enlightening to learn the pluses and minuses of real time web conferencing.