The Webinar Blog

Working With Flash Gets Harder

[July 11: Please see new update at end of article]

Thanks, Adobe. I just noticed you made it harder to support my webinar attendees with an update to your Flash Player installation process.

Many web conferencing products rely on Flash to support event registration and operation. This means that every potential attendee must have the Flash Player software installed on their computer in whatever web browser they choose to use.

For many (even most) computer users, this is not a problem. Flash is very common. If you use Google Chrome, it is an integrated part of the browser. But given a large enough sample population (is the worldwide population of computer users large enough for you?), some people have difficulties.

I have written in the past about companies that choose to block Flash on employees’ computers because of concerns about security or impacts on productivity (Flash is commonly used to run games, animations, and entertainment videos). I can’t tell you how fun it is to tell all the employees of a major financial institution or government agency that they can’t watch your webcast and there is no workaround.

Other users simply have an old and outdated version of Flash on their computer (or in the particular browser they use). Adobe has a web page created to help check and upgrade Flash Player versions. I forward this so often that I created a short URL to give it to people in a hurry…  http://j.mp/vercheck

Go ahead and click on that link. Steps 1, 2, 3 are simple and straightforward. Is Flash running? Here is your installed version. Here is the latest version. Excellent!

But… BUT!!! Look down at step 4. Let’s say you need to upgrade your version of Flash. What happens when you click on the link labeled “Download and install the latest Flash Player version”?

In a stunning “upgrade” from the simple download page that used to come up, you now get directed to an endless page (15 scrolls on my big, high-resolution monitor) filled with troubleshooting tips and special case scenarios. The first thing you see in large type at the top is the word “problems.”

The average end user takes one look at this and says “Fuggedaboutit.” Go ahead and scan the page. Can you find the download link you were promised, that actually lets you download and install the latest Flash Player version? Maybe it is 1/3 of the way down the page under “Installing Flash Player.” Point 3 says “Download and install the latest Flash Player version.” Click that and it reloads the same web page, a few lines farther down!

Now you are treated to a master class on browser configuration. You are advised to change security settings and filters, something most casual users are loathe to fool with. Eventually (halfway down the page), you hit yet another link: “Download Adobe Flash Player.” That link actually takes you to the download page you need. But now you are faced with bloatware. By default, it installs not only the underlying support software you need (just so you can get back to what you were trying to do in the first place… join a webinar), but it also tries to slip in the Google Toolbar as a browser add-in.

Adobe, this is untenable. If Flash Player is to be used as a general purpose, universal support platform for consumers, you MUST find ways to simplify its installation and the instruction process. Let people try the download and installation. If they have a problem, THEN you can send them to 15 pages of help and troubleshooting. And get rid of the icky partner software installation. The very minimum I would stand for is the checkbox option UNSELECTED by default.

For shame. This is no way to promote widespread adoption and use of a technology.

[UPDATE: JULY 11, 2012] I am happy to report that Adobe made a change to the version check and install pages. They are back to being shorter and easier to manage. The version check now takes you directly to the download/install page. Thank you, Adobe!

 

Technorati Tags: Adobe,Flash,Flash Player

Step Away From The Mouse

The next time you give a live demo in your web conference, do me a favor, would you? Take your damned hand off the mouse!

Most of us tend to “talk with the mouse.” We use it in the same way that many stage presenters use a laser pointer. You point out an item of interest by moving the mouse rapidly back and forth under the word or number, pretending as though you are underlining it. Or you make rapid circles around the item, drawing a virtual outline.

The problem is that what you see as the presenter is not what your audience sees. You see nice smooth, fluid movement of the mouse as it draws the line you have visualized in your mind. Your audience sees a cursor jumping spasmodically between random spots on the screen.

No matter how good your web conferencing software’s screen sharing performance may be, it can’t possibly keep up with sustained rapid movement of the cursor. The physics of reading the pixel changes on your display, comparing them to the previous scan, coding the data, sending it through the internet, and reassembling it into an updated image on the attendee’s screen takes a finite amount of time. If an attendee has a slow internet connection, a slow graphics processor, or an overworked computer, the problem is exacerbated. Some of the redraws get separated in time. Result? Disconnected appearances of your cursor here and there. The audience can’t tell what you are doing, but they sure as heck know they don’t like it!

Along the same lines, I often see presenters push the cursor idly around the screen while they talk. The movement has no purpose. They don’t even realize they are doing it. But since it is the only visual change occurring, the audience’s eyes are drawn to the movement. They start looking for meaning in the positioning of the mouse and get frustrated when there is none to be found.

The answer is simple. Move your cursor simply and deliberately to point at an item you want to talk about. Then take your hand off the mouse. Move it to the next item of interest. Then take your hand off the mouse. If you want to chat about something for a while, move your cursor out of the way of the image. Then take your hand off the mouse.

Learn this one simple trick and your web demos will instantly become a little more effective and a little less nauseating for your audience.

Really.

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,online seminar,web conference,web conferencing,web demo,online demo,webcast,webcasting,web meeting,online meeting

A Busy Day In Web Conferencing News

My Industry News page is getting a workout this week and it’s only Tuesday! Here are some of the press releases that caught my eye:

omNovia says they are offering their web conferencing platform for use as a “white label” reseller product. If you aren’t familiar with the term, it means that another vendor can rebrand it as their own software and call it by another name. The underlying technology remains with the original manufacturer, who gets a cut off licensing fees collected by the reseller.

On a related note, Onstream Media says that ACT Conferencing will resell Onstream’s webcasting technology and services. This is a little different than the omNovia news, as the relationship keeps the Onstream Media brand prominent. ACT simply acts as another sales channel. Many companies work under this type of arrangement in the web conferencing arena. Some of the big conferencing service providers carry as many as five or six different competing webinar/webcast products, and will happily license whichever one seems to best fit the client.

White label relationships are hard to track down. The whole point of the exercise is to give the reseller a product they can call their own (without having to invest in R&D or maintenance work). I can often spot technologies being used under different names just because I work with them so much.

But whether disclosed or discreet, partner sales are growing ever more important to web conferencing software vendors. It is amazingly difficult to capture marketing attention and then to make a compelling case for competitive advantage over other technologies. New buyers often view web collaboration software as a commodity, basing their decision purely on price. That’s a pity, as different products have significant strengths and weaknesses in specific feature implementations and use cases. Unfortunately it can be very hard to understand the impact of the differences until you have used a product in practice and found what matters to you.

Moving on, I see that Cisco is expanding the WebEx brand name to encompass social networking, telepresence, video calling, mobile collaboration, and group calendaring. Hmmm… I seem to recall Microsoft playing with the same idea after they purchased Placeware and turned it into Live Meeting. The web conferencing/webinar applications that gave birth and leading market share to the product eventually became subsumed by the larger concepts of Unified Communications/Collaboration, business applications, and a suite of productivity enhancers. Eventually Placeware/Live Meeting quietly trickled away, replaced by Microsoft Lync, just another piece of Office 365 functionality.

The Cisco marketing alignment is taking the opposite branding approach. It looks like everything will end up falling under the WebEx label. But I can’t help wondering if this will lead to dilution of the WebEx brand as a solution for webinars, web training, and web conferencing.

I got a chuckle out of ON24’s announcement that they plan to provide support for their webcasting and virtual event software on the Microsoft Surface. If you don’t follow techgeek news coverage, you may not have heard about the Surface yet. Yesterday afternoon Microsoft sprang a surprise announcement on the technical media, with no advance hints as to the news. It turned out to be their specs for a new Windows-based tablet computer. ON24 did a nice job of getting on the stick fast and getting a press release out there to benefit from the search term popularity while Microsoft’s announcement was hot. But isn’t the new tablet supposed to run Windows 8? I hope that software currently running on Windows will be able to run on the new device! (That’s a little glib… There are always changes and testing needed to support specialized interfaces and hardware quirks. But I think this is likely to become a necessary support path for any vendor wanting to work with the next version of Windows… Microsoft is putting a lot of emphasis on touch-based interfacing).

I’ll close with a shout-out to the marketing team at Sonic Foundry. I am absolutely astonished at their machine-like ability to generate customer adoption press releases for Mediasite. I wish I could have pumped out that many customer stories when I was in software product marketing! It helps build public awareness along with perception as a popular and successful product/company. Very impressive.

Don’t forget… You can stay informed of news stories and articles related to webinars and webcasting by subscribing to my Webinar Success news feed. Just sign up on the Industry News page. Subscriptions are automated and single-purpose… You don’t end up on any marketing or promotion list. You just get the news updates.

 

Technorati Tags: Sonic Foundry,Mediasite,ON24,Cisco,WebEx,Microsoft Surface,omNovia,Onstream Media,ACT Conferencing,webinar,webcast,webcasting,web conferencing,web conference,web meeting,web seminar

FuzeBox Is Giving Away An iPad

Oh yeah… Along with the iPad comes a one-year subscription to the Fuze web conferencing service. Second prize is a year of Fuze and a Jambox by Jawbone. You’re going to have to look up that last one on your own. I’m so hopelessly out of date with entertainment devices that the product name carries no meaning for me whatsoever.

Clicking here may possibly take you to the FuzeBox sweepstakes page on Facebook. But knowing Facebook and its ever-changing security and linking policies, it is just as likely to take you to a 40-page legal document. You can always type Fuzebox into your Facebook search bar and get to it on your own.

I’ve been clicking around for a while on their Facebook page and their web site. I can’t find any sweepstakes rules or description anywhere. They must exist, but I’m not looking in the right place. Which means I can’t tell you when the sweepstakes ends or which level of Fuze Meeting you win.

Oh well… Something for nothing. Who am I to argue?

Good luck!

Technorati Tags: Fuze,FuzeBox,Fuze Meeting,web conference,web conferencing,web meeting,online meeting

New Features In Adobe Connect

Hooray! I’m finally allowed to talk about the new release of Adobe Connect (Release 9). It has been in beta for some time, but today they made the formal product announcement and removed the embargo on talking about its new features.

Unfortunately you still have to wait a while to use it… Availability is scheduled for late summer, starting with on-premise licenses and being phased in across Adobe’s various servers for customers using the hosted (SaaS) model. I seem to recall that Release 8 took a long time to finish the phased rollout to all hosted customers when it was released, so there is no telling when you might see Release 9 on your account.

This is the release I have been waiting for. Adobe got serious about upgrading Connect’s applicability for external business webinars. They added significant functionality around registration, attendee communications, customer-level and event-level branding, lead tracking, reporting, and analytics. Enterprise marketers should go gaga for the new capabilities.

In addition, Adobe beefed up support for mobile devices… Not just for attendees, but for presenters as well. And they enhanced features to support enterprise-level eLearning while they were at it.

Current users will be happy to hear that there are no major changes to the look and feel inside the conference room that would require retraining your presenters or that would shock recurrent attendees to your webinars. Improvements have been made in mostly subtle ways… For instance, you can hide title bars on pods and you can use your own arbitrary graphic as the background wallpaper inside the room. Pleasant and appreciated, but not earthshaking. My favorite addition in the room is the ability to run a real-time interactive poll that allows type-in answers. You can display the responses to the audience, acting as a great brainstorming whiteboard.

The mobility story is easy to summarize as well. You will be able to present from or attend from just about any mobile device -- whether iOS (such as an iPad), Android, or BlackBerry PlayBook. They added some touch-screen enhancements to allow “finger painting” whiteboard annotations and selection of meeting content. The one restriction I noted is that you can’t select document files living on an iOS device’s local memory. So presenting slides, PDFs, or anything other than a simple photograph from an iPad requires a pre-meeting step of uploading the content to your Adobe account on the server. Android devices do not have this limitation.

The eLearning side of things will now support HTML5 and SCORM 1.2 content. They are adding a more comprehensive course registration module, while Presenter and Captivate will get upgrades as part of Adobe’s ELS (eLearning Suite).

With that out of the way, let me return to the big enhancements in webinar management. Adobe is making a clear statement here. They want to go after enterprise and government applications of web conferencing for lead generation and public outreach. Management of these public-facing web events is necessarily more complex than simple ad hoc web meetings or internal web conference sessions. Setting up webinars and taking advantage of all the new features takes extra time and effort. A designated webinar administrator will need to become familiar with the behind-the-scenes functionality and will do plenty of customization work when creating webinars. But the results you can get justify the extra labor. 

The base level Adobe Connect product will work much the same way that it currently does. You’ll have access to a meeting room supporting web conferences of up to 100 people. If you want more capacity in your meeting, you purchase a “seminar room.” These can go up to 1500-person meeting sizes (newly upgraded from the previous 600 maximum).

Adobe used to charge a large fixed amount for these seminar rooms, no matter how many people you wanted to support. So as soon as you exceeded 100 people, you had to pay for the full maximum possible room size. When I spoke to Guillaume Privat, the director of product management for Adobe Connect, he confirmed that seminar room pricing will now be tiered, enabling customers to create a more reasonable relationship between capacity needs and cost.

The second optional purchase you can make for your account is the Events Module. This is where the fun comes in. To be perfectly honest, I never thought the Events Module in Adobe Connect 7 and 8 was worth the extra cost. Its functionality didn’t match the sophistication and flexibility of the rest of the web conferencing platform. I’m singing a different tune with Release 9.

Here are some of my favorite enhancements for Events:

• Rich customization of public-facing pages. Registration page customization in most webinar products consists of “place a fixed-size logo in the upper left corner of the page and select the additional fields that should appear after our standard registration fields.” But Connect will now let you do customization that is worthy of the term. Using an integrated online version of Adobe’s CQ content management system, you can drag and drop text elements, graphic elements, event-specific runtime parameters (such as title, start time, duration, etc), registration fields, and more onto a web page. The event can truly look like you own it, rather than Adobe owning it. In addition to registration pages, you can construct landing pages for event information; speaker information with pictures, bios, and links; and login pages for entering the event. Unfortunately you can’t get to the underlying HTML code, as CQ is not a code-generator system. But this is the first do-it-yourself ability I have seen for being able to fully customize and test different landing page layouts, colors, and branding.
   
• Rich customization of emails. Everything I said in the last paragraph applies to attendee emails as well. You have full drag and drop customization of HTML emails for things such as registration confirmation, reminders, and follow up messages. The limitation here is that Connect cannot send multi-part messages with a text version for people unable or unwilling to view HTML emails.
   
• One-time registration. Connect currently requires webinar registrants to create an account on your system, with an email and password. This is convenient for people coming back to multiple events, but is a pain for people just wanting to get to a single webinar. Being forced to create an account can definitely reduce registration rates. Now Connect lets you bypass that step and just fill in the registration fields for the one event in question. By the way, you can create tracked registration to give access to individual documents or recordings on your server as well.
   
• Lead tracking analytics. Adobe has integrated full lead tracking all the way through the engagement process. You can set up parameters on the URL that brings people to your landing page or registration page. From then on, Connect tracks them all the way through the system. You can get reports showing the “funnel numbers” for each tracked campaign or lead source. How many people visited the landing page. Of those, how many clicked through to register. How many of them completed registration? How many then attended? How long were they in session? How much did they interact with the software during the session? And if your company uses Adobe’s SiteCatalyst, you can dump all the information into that marketing analysis tool to be cut, aggregated and reported as desired. You can even set up lead qualification criteria based on a combination of an attendee’s registration field demographic answers and their real-time behaviors during the webinar. So a sales rep could give higher priority to an attendee who asked a lot of questions than to someone who just passively watched the presentation.
   
• Graphical reporting. Post-webinar reports get some very fancy online eye-candy. Lead funnels, minute-by-minute attendance and engagement, poll results, and more can all be seen online with nice graphic depictions. Some even allow interaction to focus in on details. This feature needs some extension in a future release to allow saving or downloading the information in graphical format. For the moment, downloaded reports are numerical only.
   
• Microsite event catalogs. Does your company run a lot of webinars? Now when you set them up, you can generate a customizable, branded “microsite” that displays a catalog of your webinars. You can categorize them to let people browse within a particular topic area. They can sort the list by name or date, or see the webinars on a calendar. And the entire microsite can be embedded as an iFrame object on your company’s web page. So you can make it an integrated part of your website hierarchy.

As I mentioned earlier, the Events Module won’t be appropriate for everyone. The cost (not released at this time) and the administrative effort required won’t be practical for most individuals or small businesses. But larger organizations with dedicated marketing departments should be able to create more effective public webinar campaigns than were previously possible in a do-it-yourself product.

I’m guessing this will be a boon (and economic boom) for the many value-added channel partners who work with Adobe to resell Connect and provide service and support for clients.

If you ever wondered about the difference between webinars and web meetings, the Events Module in Adobe Connect 9 makes it abundantly clear.

Technorati Tags: Adobe Connect,webinar,web seminar,online seminar,web marketing,web conference,web conferencing,web meeting,online meeting,webcast,webcasting,Guillaume Privat,lead tracking

Subtitling Your Video Recording

A client recently asked me to add subtitles to their webinar archive recording in order to make it accessible for the hearing impaired. I thought I would share the steps involved, along with a marvelous service I used.

The first thing you should know is that you probably won’t be able to add subtitles to your recording if it is in your web conferencing provider’s proprietary format and it lives on their servers. You will need to convert it to a standard video format such as WMV or MP4 or FLV and download it to a place where you can work with the file. (Vendors: If you allow subtitling of webinar recordings on your servers, please add a comment to this post to let us know about it!)

You will need a full electronic file transcript of all narration in your webinar. Don’t worry about formatting it at this point. You just need all the spoken words in text format.

You’ll need to rip the audio track from your video to make it easier to work with. Lots of software applications can do this step. The audio quality is not particularly important, so feel free to use a lower bitrate to reduce the file size of your MP3 audio file.

If you weren’t working from a prepared script during your webinar, you’ll probably use a transcription service to prepare the text transcript file from your audio recording. There are many service providers who offer transcription. Note that if your subject is highly technical, with buzzwords and abbreviations, you will need to review the transcript to clean up things the transcriber doesn’t understand. I don’t have a recommendation for a transcription provider. Just search on “audio transcription” or “transcription services.” You will be surprised how inexpensive audio transcription is nowadays.

Once you have the text file ready, you can move on to subtitling. The most common format for subtitles is .SRT (known as “SubRip” in reference to a software program that reads them). A SubRip file is a simple text file that breaks every phrase into the specific words that appear on screen along with time codes for when they appear and disappear. The time codes are written out to a thousandth of a second.

Writing out time codes is one of the most mind-numbing tasks imaginable, as you keep playing, pausing, and checking times for each few words. This is where I found an amazing service provider. CaptionSync from Automatic Sync Technologies has an automated service that creates a .SRT file from your transcript. You upload the text file, upload the MP3 recording, and it sends back a completely coded .SRT file, automatically broken into time codes that match the audio.

I can vouch from my experience that the algorithms they use are impressive. We had five different speakers on our recording, both male and female. One speaker had a pronounced accent and spoke quickly. One speaker went significantly off script during a paragraph. But the software didn’t give up. It did context matching to keep things flowing at the proper rate to get the words on the screen until it found the next exact match. Really impressive! And the cost was ridiculously low.

I found out after the fact that I could have added some special text codes to my transcript file that would force breaks at designated positions or allow me to add nonverbal subtitle notations such as the speaker’s name. But these edits are fairly easy to make after the fact, since you are playing with a basic text file.

I did find it easier to make my edits using some additional free software. There are a variety of SRT editors available, and you can search for them online. I downloaded Subtitle Workshop from URUWorks. Once I figured out how to use the editing commands efficiently, I was very impressed with the way it let me recombine and resplit subtitle phrases without messing up the time codes. It’s not immediately intuitive, so read the documentation. But the power is great.

And I was able to test how well the assembled video with subtitles looked by using the free online site dotSUB.com. It lets you upload a .SRT file and a video, and play the video with the subtitles overlaid. You can set markers and pause playback if you need to adjust time codes. It gives you the timing down to that thousandth of a second. I don’t like it as an editor, but it’s good for testing and checking times.

Once you have your .SRT file tested and coded to your satisfaction, you use your favorite video editing software to combine them. Most of the major packages on the market give you the ability to create a subtitled video output file. I use Camtasia from TechSmith, which works fine if you are careful about how line breaks are specified in your SubRip file (don’t save it as plain text without hard line breaks or split lines will run together on the video).

If all the post-processing and video production is beyond your means, you can always just pay CaptionSync to produce your captioned video for you. I didn’t use that service so I can’t vouch for it.

 

Technorati Tags: video production,subtitle,.SRT,SubRip,CaptionSync,Automatic Sync Technologies,Subtitle Workshop,URUWorks,dotSUB,Camtasia