The Webinar Blog

Infuriating Web Conferencing User Agreement

I started up a free trial of Nefsis web conferencing today. But I’m not going to be reviewing the software. Because the first thing I saw upon starting the application was a big box filled with text and a notice saying that I couldn’t enter the conference room unless I carefully read and agreed to be bound by the legal provisions in the text. The text scrolled. And scrolled. And scrolled some more. I copied the text into a Word file and kept it at the default 11 point type it was presented in. It filled 17 and a half pages.

It turns out that every attendee to my meeting is presented with the same legal document and requirement to be bound by the 17 and a half pages of text. If you present your attendees with that kind of barrier to entry in an event presented under your own company name, you are crazy. And they would be crazy to attend.

I did a little scanning. Included in the agreement are such gems as the following (I will paraphrase to cut down the verbiage):

• Nefsis can modify the agreement at any time, apparently without notification. My continued use of the software automatically binds me to whatever changes happen to be included in the active version of the document at that time. A cursory glance during another login showed me no obvious way to bring up the current version of the software agreement.

• Among all the types of content I may not show in my web conference (and that’s a LONG paragraph) is included this puzzler… “information for which you do not have the right to permit Nefsis to collect and process.” I don’t even know what that means, but I don’t like it!

• “The Nefsis Contact Interface allows Nefsis to obtain and record information about your contacts, your computer use, and your presence at your computer at any given time, among other information, and that Nefsis can utilize and maintain this information (1) for its own use, (2) to provide marketing communications to you, (3) to provide marketing communications to your contacts during any Trial Use, Free Basic Use, or Beta Use.”

• Nefsis at its sole discretion may disclose any information related to your use of the site. If your use of the web conferencing software “includes password-restricted access to your sensitive information (such as, for example, customer lists and contractual terms)” then by accessing it in a web conference “you consent to the display and storage of such information by Nefsis and accept all risks of unauthorized access to such information.”

• As the nameholder of a Nefsis account, I am personally responsible for the compliance of all other persons who access the site (whether hosts or attendees) with all provisions of the agreement and I am responsible for any legal action and costs associated with legal actions taken by Nefsis against those persons.

• I waive all rights to collecting ANY monetary damages caused by Nefsis in any event. The most compensation I may claim is three months worth of subscription fees.

• Nefsis can contact me legally via email. I have to contact them via registered, signature-required mail or express overnight service.

• If I am a California resident, I waive a specific legal right under the California Civil Code. If I am not a California resident, I waive “any applicable law that is similar to California Civil Code Section 1542.” (ed: I have to admit… This one in particular takes my breath away. They don’t know what laws might exist, but they expect me to waive them en masse, whatever they might be.)

• If I am an individual entering into the agreement on behalf of an entity, I have authorization to bind the entity to all terms and conditions of the agreement. (ed: Try sliding that statement by your corporate legal department as you run a video conference at work!)

• If you have a trial or free account, Nefsis can identify and contact any attendees you invite to your conferences and “may send frequent e-mail communications to you and to such third parties for various marketing purposes.”

I railed against this kind of quasi-legal nonsense a couple of years ago when it came up on another web conferencing provider’s site. The only thing we as consumers can do in the face of such onerous and unreasonable non-signatory obligatory use restrictions is to vote with the little X symbol in the corner of the browser window. Do not host a meeting with Nefsis and do not attend one until they start behaving like a reasonable business entity.

It may seem like I take delight in picking on Nefsis. I actually do not. I was hoping to make good practical use of a powerful video sharing feature they have. I wish I could concentrate on the functionality of the product. I’d still like to play with it someday. I hope someday they will let me.

Technorati Tags: Nefsis,video conferencing,web conferencing,web conference,videoconference

IE A Security Risk, But ON24 Demands It

If you follow the technical side of the news, you will have noted stories in recent days about a security vulnerability in Internet Explorer that is unpatched so far. The government of Germany went so far as to issue a public recommendation to all citizens to temporarily stop using Microsoft’s web browser.

One of my clients uses ON24 Webcast Center. Meeting attendees and presenters can log in using a variety of browsers. But I discovered today that I cannot log in to my administrator account on any browser other than Internet Explorer. I attempted it on Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. Both login pages returned a terse note: “Unsupported browser. Please install MS IE 7.0 or higher.”

Hmmm… I am not a huge fan of software so closely tied to one and only one web browser. That seems like an archaic dependency in a time when web browsing alternatives are so readily available. And when Internet Explorer seems to be the target of more and more attacks.

The good news is that I also have a test account of ON24’s updated version of their webcasting software: Webcast Elite. I am happy to report that it let me log in using both Chrome and Firefox.

Take this as just one more reason to upgrade to ON24’s newer product if you are still using the older Webcast Center. The biggest reason is that Webcast Elite is just an infinitely better piece of webcasting software. Sometimes change is good.

Technorati Tags: ON24,Webcast Center,Webcast Elite,Internet Explorer,webinar,web seminar,web conference,web conferencing,webcast,webcasting

What's The Deal With WebEx Event Center?

There are things I like about Cisco’s WebEx Event Center. There are things I don’t like about it. But my post title refers to a higher level concern than individual feature/function analysis. What the heck is Cisco doing with the product as a whole?

I’m trying to remember when I first used WebEx for business webinars. Maybe 13 or 14 years ago. Today’s version of the product is fundamentally the same. Yes, there have been small improvements here and there. But over all, Event Center has the same command bars, the same layout, and the same functionality presented in the same old interface. Is that still good enough? Does Cisco care?

To find out, I spoke with Rajiv Saxena, the manager of Event Center product management at Cisco. I shared my observation that press releases and news stories from Cisco over the past year or so have tended to focus on peer-level collaboration using WebEx Meeting Center (or its upgrade: WebEx Meetings). Cisco gives the impression of promoting WebEx purely for its integration into larger concepts of unified communications/collaboration, and not so much as a standalone solution for web events. Event Center seems to just rumble along on autopilot without much marketing push to gain new customers or much innovation to improve functionality for existing users. Meanwhile, competitive products have entered the market or upgraded their interfaces and functionality.

Rajiv emphasized two points strongly. The first is that in many ways Cisco is constrained from making a lot of significant changes to the way that Event Center looks and operates because of its huge existing user base. There is no question that WebEx is the 800-pound gorilla of the web conferencing world in terms of market share and usage. Rajiv said that when you look at major international corporations with their own internal WebEx training programs, user guides, internal usage policies and procedures, or desires for application stability, it becomes difficult to suddenly alter the way their software behaves. At least three times in our conversation, he used the phrase “We are stuck with that.”

But the second point he made is that WebEx Meetings just went into general availability three months ago. It contained significant changes to Meeting Center, especially in terms of meeting setup and post-event activities. Rather than being a direct upgrade, it is being offered as a new, alternative product option for users of Meeting Center. Rajiv said that Cisco can use WebEx Meetings as “our definition of what the next gen platform should look like.” They can extend the ideas tested with WebEx Meetings to improve the full web event lifecycle for Event Center users, from setup to reporting and follow up.

Rajiv was careful to give no timelines, or even any assurances that Cisco had specific plans for product development on a corresponding newer version of Event Center. So I’ll just have to chalk it up to my general gut-feel that this seems to be an inevitable direction for the product to take. Rajiv did tell me that Cisco has entered into a phase where they are more closely working with their major customers to better understand needs and desires for web event functionality, using the new WebEx platform assets as a base to start discussions.

I have to admit, that statement leaves a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. Cisco should already have a darned good idea of what is needed and what their customers think. They have more users than anybody in the industry. The product has been remarkably stable for many years. How does the song go? “If you don’t know me by now…”

But I’ll cut Rajiv a break from a personal perspective. He hasn’t been the Event Center product manager for very long, and there’s nothing he can personally do about past history. I asked him why I couldn’t find a user forum online, a place to collect ideas, get feedback, and share use cases. He wasn’t quite sure. It seems like a good place to start, if you really do want to learn from and respond to your customers’ key issues.

In the meantime, my personal opinion is that existing customers of Event Center may want to stay with the product for reasons of stability, but for new customers it faces awfully stiff competition from other products that have leapfrogged it in functionality and flexibility over the last decade. It is time for Event Center to get the innovation engines running again.

 

Technorati Tags: Cisco WebEx,WebEx Event Center,WebEx Meetings,WebEx Meeting Center,Rajiv Saxena,webinar,web event,web meeting,online event,online meeting,web conference,web conferencing

Managing Webinar Chat

How much control do you have over what attendees type in your webinar console? Probably not as much as you deserve. I find webinar vendors tend to overlook the importance of this functionality.

In this particular discussion I am using the term “Chat” interchangeably with “Q&A” – They may indeed be separate functions in your particular web conferencing platform, but my comments apply to whichever you use.

It is an empirical fact that you tend to get more interaction, participation, and attendee responsiveness in webinars when the participants can see what other people are typing. It produces a sense of community, group participation, and camaraderie.

Unfortunately, some of that interaction and participation may include questions and comments that detract from your event. It’s a shame, but I have run across abusive messages, competitive marketing, off-topic complaints, and misinformation in attendee messages. It would be nice if vendors gave you a way to open things up for audience group interaction, but still gave you a way to protect yourself from the minority cases of problematic content.

I think the following capabilities are necessary in order to pull this off. I can’t think of any vendor that offers all of them, although many products offer bits and pieces.

1) Ability to delete a single comment. I am amazed that this is not universally available. But there are subtleties that would make it even more powerful.

a) Make sure the report log captures it. I need a record of everything that was typed in, even if I choose to suppress it from public view. Too many vendors treat a delete as if the comment never was typed. I want to know after the fact who my troublemakers were!

b) Flag & delete. My first priority is to get the comment out of the public chat stream. So I don’t want anything to slow down that action. But once it’s gone, I may want to communicate with the contributor and answer their question, explain my action, or give them a warning. It would be nifty if the software immediately killed the comment, but created a queue for private response to that person whenever I get a moment free. Note, this is different from most current implementations that require you to type your response, send it, and then take action on the comment.

2) Ability to clear a group of comments at once. This is great when you ask for something inconsequential like “Type your first name to prove you can hear me.” In an event with hundreds of people, I don’t want to select each line separately. Let me pick the first and last, deleting everything between them. That is standard operating procedure for Microsoft selection (Shift-Select selects everything between)… Why isn’t it used inside of web conferencing products?

3) Ability to clear the entire chat stream up till now. But again, it needs to stay in the event’s chat log report. I just want a chance to clear the active display area to start a fresh conversational stream.

4) Suppress a user. Many products let you expel a user from the meeting. But that’s a bit harsh. Why not just shut off his/her ability to type chat messages? I can’t think of a product that allows this.

5) Expel a user. This is a last resort option and shouldn’t really be necessary if you can suppress their ability to comment. But I suppose it’s nice if you find you have a real competitor in your session.

6) Change from public to private mode. I like to be able to open up public chat for brainstorming or innocuous conversation, then go to a private moderated mode during the main presentation so you can choose which questions to address. Even better if you can keep the public and private streams separate so that your private stuff stays unseen by participants even though you open up a public response forum to a specific question or brainstorming exercise.

7) Extend this control to presenter messages. Some products let you delete attendee messages, but not those from presenters. Hey… presenters make mistakes. Sometimes they type a message in the public area that was meant for just the presentation team. Embarrassing!

8) Suppress answered questions. Once you have addressed a comment or question out loud, it is often nice to clear it out of the chat stream. It makes it easier to see what still remains to be answered. You need it to show up in the log report as answered, but disappear from the visible chat queue.

If this strikes a chord with you as a webinar user, let your vendor know. They prioritize feature changes based on customer comments. If they don’t know this is important to you, you won’t get it.

 

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

Smash Your Speakerphone

As a professional webinar moderator, I deal with untold numbers of guest speakers. We hold rehearsal and familiarization sessions and I impress upon them the need for high quality source audio. My inviolable rule? “No speakerphones or cell phones.”

Sometimes they push back. “I really need to have my hands free to look through my papers.” “I can’t hold the phone to my ear and move the mouse at the same time.” “We want to be in the same room so we can answer questions together and have a more interactive experience.”

Sometimes they just ignore me and trust that I won’t be able to tell. They are wrong. I can always tell when someone is on a speakerphone. It has a distinctive sound that places a perceptual distance between the speaker and the listener.

But my favorite is when they call in for the live webinar and tell me they are using a speakerphone, “But it sounds fine, right?”

I sigh. Yes, it may be perfectly acceptable. Clear, good volume. Maybe a little more distant than a headset, but who cares? They settle in happily, secure in the knowledge that they were right… Their speakerphone is fine. The rules don’t apply in their case.

Then the webinar starts. And over the course of 45 minutes of unbroken presentation, the speakerphone works its old magic:

• It picks up the presenter’s chair squeaking and rattling. They were sitting more still during the pre-show.

• It picks up papers shuffling, fingers drumming on the table, keyboard and mouse clicking, and other people whispering in the background. Oh, let’s not forget traffic noises, sirens, and construction noises outside.

• It picks up a deep bass thump that none of us can hear with our own ears. Somewhere outside or elsewhere in the building, pounding is being transmitted through the floor, into the table, and straight into the base of the phone.

• It starts producing microsecond cutouts or echoes at the beginning of each sentence as the sound-activated microphone switches between send and receive.

• It produces wild swings in voice volume as the presenter turns towards and away from the microphone while looking at papers, the keyboard, the screen, another screen, and the rest of the room.

A speakerphone is a marvelous piece of equipment. Use it for your conference calls, your casual conversations, your group meetings. But please stay away from it in formal presentations that represent your company to the public. It only adds more opportunities to detract from the professional image you want to convey.

Technorati Tags: speakerphone,speaker phone,webinar,web seminar,online seminar,webcast,webcasting,web conference,web conferencing

What Is HD Web Conferencing?

Last week I wrote a post about Unique Webinar Features. I invited vendors to write to me if they had a unique functionality in their webinar/webcast software that I should mention.

Ryan took up the challenge on behalf of InterCall Webcast Studio. He pointed to a press release they issued in July, claiming to be the first webcasting product to “support organic HD through a webcam. It provides resolution up to 720p.”

The press release included a provocative quote from Mike Nessler, executive vice president of InterCall Event Services: “While other webcasting tools claim to be HD and use HD tools on the broadcast end, they’re still delivering just standard video to the desktop. InterCall Webcast Studio breaks that barrier by delivering a full HD experience to users on their devices.”

I have to admit, I’m not sure of my footing with this issue. HD (High Definition) video started as a television broadcast concept, where the term was initially rather loosely applied to any TV electronic scanning format with more scanning lines than previous mechanical systems could handle. Modern broadcast standards have attempted to put a more rigorous definition on HDTV, saying that it should either be 1080 or 720 lines of vertical display resolution. The letter “p” mentioned in the press release (720p) indicates progressive scanning, as opposed to interlaced scanning. Look it up… I have already lost half my readers and we haven’t even gotten to the good stuff. There’s another statistic called Frame Rate that enters the equation, and I don’t intend to lecture you about that either.

The problem with talking about HD video is that many vendors have indeed used the phrase in a non-rigorous context. Some companies play up their “HD video” as just another way to say their video is subjectively of a high quality. But others seem to use the phrase to mean true 720p internet videocasting. For instance, I found a Citrix newsletter from 2010 that includes this quote about GoToMeeting with HDFaces: “Multistream video feeds can accommodate six participants at once, and can run at 720p for a true HD experience.”

The other problem with talking about resolution as the functional differentiator for your webcast video is that it isn’t sufficient to describe the user experience that event attendees will have. Other things strongly influence the way your video comes across. You see, there are certain absolutes that can’t be avoided… webcasting a moving video image requires shoving a heck of a lot of bits through those pipes in the interwebs. Vendors are all looking for ways to cut corners in order to reduce the number of bits needed to reconstruct that image on the far end.

The frame rate I glossed over earlier is one of those items. You can have a nice high resolution image that looks jerky and juddery because it doesn’t update itself often enough. Compression algorithms are another component. You can throw away small bits of the picture “that don’t matter” or use fancy programming to compress and reconstruct the image on either end. And different processes can produce more or less pleasing results.

Then the vendor can play games with trading off audio bandwidth for video. I might not value a great looking video if it was achieved by sending audio that sounds like a tin can.

And how does the software deal with individual attendees who can’t process the signal fast enough – because of an old, slow computer; or too many programs running; or a slow/overloaded internet connection? Some products elect to reduce frame rate, others reduce resolution, others buffer the image. How often do they do this? Do they keep checking and re-raise performance if things get better, or do they assume they should stay at the “low and slow” settings?

Nobody shares these details publicly. As you can see from this high-level overview, it quickly gets too technical. And it often depends on other underlying software that might change independently of the webcast vendor (Adobe Flash Player is famous for this). And the vendors often experiment with different algorithms and approaches to see if they can improve performance. So making a valid objective comparison between different products’ “HD video” performance is likely to be a frustrating and futile exercise.

Technorati Tags: InterCall Webcast Studio,InterCall,webcast,webcasting,web conference,web conferencing,videocasting,HD video,high definition

Why Is There No Q&A Voting In Webinars?

Google has a little known utility called Google Moderator available on the web. I can’t figure out why no web conferencing vendor has implemented a similar functionality in their product. It would be a great way to encourage more productive audience interactivity.

Google Moderator lets a host create a topic area. Users with Google accounts can log into the page (you can also embed the dialog area as an iFrame on your own web page) and submit a question, see other questions, and vote a thumbs up or thumbs down on any given contribution. The most popular questions rise to the top so a moderator can easily see the ones with the most audience interest and address them.

It would be possible to use this functionality today in conjunction with a webinar. You could set up a Google Moderator page for questions before a web conference to help guide content priorities for the presenters. Some webinar products allow an attendee-usable web page to be displayed alongside other presentation content during the live event. So they could show the web page inside the webinar and let participants interact with it.

The problem with using Google Moderator is that it requires all participants to have a separate Google account and to log in to the application distinct from your web conference. I am not a fan of multiple logins. It also creates separate conversation streams inside and outside of the webinar, which can get confusing. People don’t know where to type.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could turn on this feature as native functionality inside a webinar, using the existing Q&A or Chat facility? Hey vendors… Get working on this! Let a host enable a voting panel. The most popular questions rise to the top. Once they are answered, you need a way to move them off the queue to make room for the next most popular.

ON24 is achingly close in its new release with a widget that lets people enter ideas, comment on other ideas, and vote them up and down. It’s almost perfect. But it is really made for running a brainstorming activity as an independent activity inside a web session. All they need to do is somehow integrate it with the webinar Q&A stream and we’d be there.

How about it, dear readers? As an attendee, would you like to be able to democratically influence which questions are most important? As a host or presenter, would you like a way to more easily and fairly choose the next question to address?

Add a comment on this blog post (click here if you are reading this in an email or feed reader). Let’s make collaboration more collaborative!

 

Technorati Tags: Google Moderator,webinar,web seminar,web conference,web conferencing,webcast,webcasting,web meeting,online meeting,online seminar,web collaboration