The Webinar Blog

What You Need To Know About GoToWebinar Panelists vs Organizers

Citrix GoToWebinar identifies each participant in a web conferences with an assigned role status. The three roles are: Attendee, Panelist, and Organizer.

• Attendees watch the presentation and can't make changes that affect other participants. Their microphones are muted by default.
• Panelists can communicate in a "secret chat mode" with other panelists/organizers, and have a few additional tools available. They can be heard by attendees over the broadcast.
• Organizers have full control of the session. They can start the audio broadcast to attendees, end the webinar for everyone, change any participant's role, assign who is the active presenter, and so on.

All of that makes logical sense. But there are two areas where the operational design breaks down. These have been documented in Citrix user forums and continue to cause confusion and frustration.

The first is that only organizers see questions typed by attendees. An organizer can assign one question at a time to a single panelist, who can then see that question. But if you have a team working behind the scenes to review all attendee questions, the only way to make it work is to raise every team member's authority to organizer status.

I have learned through painful experience that I need to slowly, clearly, and emphatically inform my team members what is about to happen when I raise their status:

"I am going to make you an organizer so you can see questions coming in from our audience. We are still in pre-show mode and the audience can't hear us. When you become organizer, you may hear an audio prompt telling you to press some keys to start broadcasting. DO NOT DO THIS! That takes us live and there is no way to come back to private mode. You will also see a big bold red banner at the top of your control panel with a button to start the broadcast. DO NOT CLICK IT! You also have the ability to end the webinar for everyone. BE VERY CAREFUL NOT TO CLICK THAT OPTION."

It's all so ridiculous. Panelists should be able to see questions coming in from attendees without having to give them catastrophic keys to the kingdom. [Side note: While I'm bitching, why is there no way to pause the audio broadcast and pull panelists back into private subconference? I can't fix an accidental start to the broadcast and can't have a private post-webinar briefing with my team.]

I just learned about the second problem with GoToWebinar's handling of organizers. The software tries to make life convenient for users by remembering their credentials for future use. If you log in as an organizer on a webinar and then come back on a later date to attend a different webinar, you may very well find yourself with organizer privileges, as the software remembers your previous account details.

A user wrote in to the Citrix community forum complaining that personnel in their company had unexpectedly started webinar broadcasts when they came in as attendees. Citrix technical support recommended that organizers uninstall and reinstall the GoToWebinar software after each session in order to prevent this. Fortunately a helpful board leader suggested a more rational approach, which is for organizers to turn off the "Remember me on this computer" option in GoToWebinar and manually sign out of their account after the session ends. That gives us a workaround, but it's asking for a lot of proactive operations by someone who might have come in once as a casual guest panelist.

It sure feels like these could be made more convenient and user-friendly with a couple of design changes. Maybe the product team can revisit them once the spinoff of the collaboration unit from Citrix is completed.

 

Technorati Tags: Citrix,GoToWebinar,webinar,web seminar,web conference,web conferencing,webcast,webcasting

Rebelling Against Boring PowerPoint Templates One Mango At A Time

Last week I moderated a webinar for the National Mango Board. I thought their presentation slide deck deserved a blog post, as it is a breath of fresh air in a world of boring, conventional corporate slide shows.

I uploaded the presentation to SlideShare.net and with any luck it will magically appear below this line for easy accessibility and reference:

National Mango Board 2016 Programs from Ken Molay

If you don't see anything above this sentence, please use http://j.mp/nmbshare to view the slides in a web browser.

The content is not important for our discussion purposes. This is a presentation aimed at professionals in the mango growing, distribution, and retailing chain. It isn't built for end consumers.

I admire several things about the slide design. Even at a casual glance, flipping quickly through the slides, you are immediately caught by a sense of visual interest. The slides actually make you want to watch the presentation, just to see what's coming next. Colors are bold and bright. Text is used sparingly for the most part and allows the presenter room to talk about the subject matter rather than simply reading the words off the screen. Photographs help to support some points specifically, while tying other more general topics into the main subject matter of how the association promotes mango consumption.

What may strike many corporate communications directors as absolute heresy is the lack of a consistent layout template. Bold color stripes may be placed vertically or horizontally, filling space at differing percentages of the screen to complement the needs of the graphics and text on each slide. The Mango.org logo itself is multicolored, and all its colors are allowed for use in the layouts, along with other complementary colors that fit the general "feel" of the tropical theme.

Photographs are high resolution and look crisp and sharp, without feeling like typical posed stock photography knockoffs. White text can be presented in a consistent fashion no matter what the background through the simple use of a semi-transparent shading block that can go on top of a photograph or color bar as desired.

There is plenty of branding… The Mango.org logo appears on title slides and topic introduction slides. But it is not jammed onto every slide at the expense of visual clarity or impact. No viewer is going to forget the sponsor just because two slides go by without a logo on them.

Most design professionals would tell you to pick a single format for text content and stick with it. But the Mango Board allows some text to have bullets, some to have numbers, and some to appear as centered blocks. I never feel confused as a viewer.

You can't tell, because SlideShare throws away animations anyway, but these are the slides as presented. Animations become unnecessary… The visual changes that maintain interest and help recapture attention are built into the design inconsistencies themselves.

What strikes me is that even though each slide is different, the entire presentation feels cohesive and part of an overarching design aesthetic. As a matter of fact, the most jarring and out of place slide in the entire deck is slide #43 - It has a conventional layout on a plain background, with a couple of clipped graphic boxes just hanging around a sequence of bullets. Doesn't it feel boring and primitive compared to everything else in the presentation? Doesn't that slide look like every slide in your corporate presentations?

My purpose in this post is not to micro-analyze every design decision in the presentation and to call out places where I would have raised the font by two points or shortened a sentence by two words. I'm hoping you will look at the design gestalt and ask yourself whether you could make your slides more arresting, attractive, and interesting so your audiences look forward to each click of the mouse, instead of yawning their way through text bullets on a white background, presented the same way on slide after slide. It's worth a thought!

 

Technorati Tags: National Mango Board,presentation design,PowerPoint,PowerPoint design,slide design

ON24 Simplifies Webinar Repurposing

This month ON24 announced a new offering designed to help companies get more value from their webinar recordings. The optional value-add service (supplementary license charges apply) is known as ON24 Demand, and it actually goes a bit beyond my simple description in the first sentence.

I spoke with Mark Bornstein and Mark Szelenyi about the new functionality. Both gentlemen are vice presidents at ON24 (M.B. leads Content Marketing and M.S. leads Product Management). They showed me a demo to help me get a better grasp of the capabilities and applicability of ON24 Demand.

Over the past few years, ON24 has devoted much of their attention to the use of webinars/webcasts for marketing purposes. Sure, they are perfectly happy to support investor relations, online training, corporate communications, and all the other use cases for webinars, but marketing and lead generation benefit from extra value-add capabilities that make a large and sophisticated platform stand out over more "bare bones" competitors. ON24 wants to offer those value-adds and make themselves an essential marketing tool above and beyond the basic delivery of real-time web conferencing.

One of the ways in which they are trying to help business marketers is by boosting the visibility and usefulness of recorded or archived content for on-demand consumption. Customers were already able to create a custom portal featuring archives of past live webcasts and webinars. ON24 added automated tools to improve the search optimization of those assets and make them more "discoverable" to search engine indexers. So one tool would use automated voice-to-text to create a rough transcript of what was said in the webinar and then use keyword indexing to bring it up in search results on those keywords. Another tool can do similar indexing based on text placed on PowerPoint slides used in the webinar, so those terms become searchable as well.

ON24 Demand has now made it possible to add images and video clips as content elements to be shown in a customer's content portal along with webinar archives. That's nice, but it's really just a necessary step to get to the meat of the new offering.

The fun part of the announcement centers on creating new content from your webinar archives. Recording a full 60-minute live webinar and serving it up as a big audiovisual replay of the entire session is commonplace. Media specialists know they can convert recordings to a standardized format and read it into a video editing tool such as Camtasia, Sony Movie Studio, or Adobe Premiere (etc, etc, etc) for editing and production of new video files. But those programs can have a steep learning curve and are often overkill for marketers wanting a quick and easy way to put together a shorter snippet from a recording.

ON24 Demand fills the need for such a simple interface. You take your webinar recording and use a combination of simple time slider bars or "nearest second" time codes to mark the start and end of a clip you want to save. You can mix and match these clips with other content such as uploaded video clips or image files. The software lets you drag and drop the pieces to create a complete content flow (it stitches the pieces together with simple fade effects that cannot be overridden… Remember, this isn't supposed to replace full-featured video editing suites).

The result is published as an MP4 audio/video file that can be placed in your ON24 content portal or can be stored and accessed from your choice of server. The benefit of using the content portal is that you get built in tracking, registration, and reporting that is a standard part of ON24's setup.

Potential applications include teaser clips from past webinars that are used in the promotional materials for new upcoming webinars. Or short explanatory content pieces that can be used on company web pages. Or leave-behinds as deep-dive follow up content for people who want additional information after an introductory presentation. Content marketing is an insatiable user of content pieces, and this should help many companies generate extra assets without requiring advanced expertise and time sinks.

Definitely worth a look, particularly for existing ON24 customers with a library of recorded webinars to draw upon!

Technorati Tags: ON24,ON24 Demand,webcast,webcasting,webinar,web seminar,content marketing,online seminar,online marketing,Mark Bornstein,Mark Szelenyi

Equipment Review: PurePower+ Online UPS

I recently bought a great piece of equipment that deserves a rave review. But honestly… I don't expect you to buy one for yourself. It would be unnecessary overkill for most people. Still, there must be someone else out there with the same unique requirements I had, who would appreciate knowing that this thing exists.

The equipment in question is the PurePower+ AC Regenerator from PurePower Partners LLC. It acts as a wall power conditioner, distributor, and uninterruptible power supply with battery backup. I couldn't be happier with the way it has been operating and has solved the problems I was having.

To understand why the hardware is both valuable and unique, you need a bit of background…

Supporting client webinars and webcasts means I need uninterrupted power and internet. While impossible to guarantee in practice (I am subject to inevitable breakdowns in services delivered by outside utilities), I do everything I can to reduce the risk of a catastrophic failure. I have multiple computers, two phone lines carried on different circuits, whole-building power surge suppression for spikes on the main, and I have probably bought more Uninterruptable Power Supply (UPS) units over the years than you would believe. I'm looking around my office as I write this, and I can spot four UPS units and a line conditioner parked against the wall. That's just the latest set I replaced with the PurePower+.

If you aren't aware of the problems that inconsistent power can cause to your electronic devices, it's worth exploring the subject and building up your understanding. Wall power is far less perfect than most people think. It operates within a fairly wide tolerance range and can be affected by interference and feedback from other devices plugged into the same circuit, as well as other outside factors. You can get instantaneous or longer-term voltage changes, as well as variations in the waveform frequency and shape. These can create problems for sensitive electronic equipment.

The first line of defense is a simple surge protector. Those little power strips that sell for $20 at your local office supply store prevent a big surge from traveling into your computer and frying all the circuitry. Usually. If they have a high enough load rating and fast enough response curve. There's a lot of garbage sold at the consumer level, and you don't want to stake your business on it.

The next level up is Line Conditioners and UPS units. A Line Conditioner is designed to smooth out over and under voltages to deliver a smooth and consistent waveform to your equipment. There is no standard for what kind of filtering and protection should be included in a line conditioner, so you need to study the specs carefully to figure out what a given manufacturer includes. They do not have battery backups, so they are no help if your power dies (either short or long term).

An Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) is designed to keep power flowing to your equipment in the event of a power loss. They typically contain batteries and usually offer surge suppression as well. But they aren't good at smoothing out harmonics or waveform irregularities… The ones that most people buy off Amazon or from office supply stores at the $60-$200 price range are passive units. They just let power flow straight through from the wall unless they notice a big surge or power loss. Higher prices get you faster switchover, more outlets, and bigger batteries to handle higher loads for longer runtimes.

I had a combination of those devices protecting various components, each device was carefully matched to the load ratings of my equipment and the criticality of operation under a power hit. But last year I started getting "glitches." The worst was that my cable modem would throw itself into a reset, cutting all connection to the internet and to one of my phone circuits. That's obviously unacceptable.

I got lots of different people involved… Independent electricians, the power utility company, and the cable company. We replaced the main cable line coming in from the street, swapped out the modem twice, and verified that there were no major wall voltage problems that were out of tolerance. The problems continued.

I finally decided that the modem must be reacting to small, extremely fast transients on the line that would trigger a reset. My research led me to believe that the best solution would be an Online (or Double Conversion) UPS. This type of UPS runs connected devices off its battery at all times. The battery constantly recharges from the wall power. So there is no switching time or threshold tolerance involved in noticing power drops. The device reconstructs a smooth AC waveform from the battery power, which is better than the original waveform coming from the wall.

The big problem with online UPS units is that they run hot. Since the battery is plugged in and charging at all times, they need active cooling, which means fans. And every review I read of the major players in this space commented that the fans were annoyingly loud and intrusive. I can't have that kind of noise in my office while conducting and recording webinars.

Which FINALLY brings me to the PurePower+ unit. They advertise the products for the high end audiophile community as a way to get better sound from amplifiers, preamps, and so on. As such, they are used to supporting heavy electrical power demands with no added room noise. I also liked the fact that they allow you to supplement the primary battery with an add-on external battery for longer runtimes in the event of a power drop.

I spoke to a marketing manager at PurePower (they are based in Canada, in the triangle between Detroit, Toronto, and Niagara Falls). He set me up with a PurePower+ 1500, which is the lowest capacity unit in their lineup. It is rated to deliver 1350 watts continuous power, 1750 watts for 2-minute temporary draws, 2700 watts for 10-second bursts, and an astonishing headroom of 6750 watts on an instantaneous burst!

With the attached external battery, the specs estimate that the unit can run a full 1350 watts continuous load for 30 minutes, and a half load for 110 minutes.

My units showed up securely packaged and well-protected from shipping apes. The main unit and external battery are large and heavy. They look somewhat like audio amplifiers. You can rotate the display on the main unit and stand both boxes on their thin edges, like two tower-format desktop computers standing side by side. Otherwise you plant them horizontally on a big rectangle of floorspace and stack one on top of the other. The external battery connects with a thick, heavy cable that forces the two boxes to be in close contact.

Each box has small perforations in the case near the frontplate and larger grating vents at the rear. I am astonished that these provide enough airflow for cooling, but I haven't heard a fan come on in the entire time I have owned them, and the cases never feel even moderately warm to the touch.

The PurePower+ has 10 outlets for connecting equipment, and the slots seem well-anchored, with a good grip on the plugs. I plugged in two desktop computers, three LCD monitors, audio speakers, a modem, a router, and a desk phone. The rated power consumption of all those devices together is 962 watts, but the load indicator on the PP+ front panel stays under the 50% mark. If I turn off my backup computer and monitor, I'm sure I could get two hours of continuous power for my main system, which would let me finish any scheduled client webinar even in the face of a power loss.

Most importantly, I have not had a single modem reset or operating glitch in my equipment since I installed the new power unit. It runs silent, runs long, runs cool, uses only one wall outlet to power up to 10 devices, and provides a well conditioned, tightly regulated power signal.

With all of that going for it, why did I start this article by saying I don't expect you to buy one for yourself? Because it costs WAYYYY more than typical consumer-grade UPS or line conditioner units. My combination of the main unit and external battery set me back in the neighborhood of $4000. That's many, many times the cost you would pay for a typical home UPS unit. Of course it's apples and oranges in terms of what goals the products are designed to satisfy.

The PurePower+ lets me keep my business running in the event of a complete power failure. It eliminates the demonstrated line quality problems I had. It creates no noise in the room. The additional peace of mind and security I get completely justifies the cost for me. I'm a very satisfied customer. Your situation is likely to be different than mine, and a lower-cost contingency solution will probably work for you. But it's nice to know a higher end solution is available and performs as promised in case you ever need it!

 

Technorati Tags: uninterruptable power supply,line conditioner,line conditioning,power conditioning,double conversion UPS,online UPS,PurePower,PurePower Partners

PowerPoint Tips For Webinar Hosts

Here's a little collection of PowerPoint tips I make use of when working on my own webinars and while supporting clients. These have been floating around the internet for quite some time, so I don't claim any brilliant new personal discoveries in this space. But who knows… You might trip across something you had forgotten or something that is new to you.

TIPS TO REDUCE FILE SIZE

1) Don't copy and paste images onto slides. Save images to your hard drive and use PowerPoint's "Insert Picture" command to bring them onto your slide. Once they have been inserted in this manner, you can copy/paste or duplicate them within the PowerPoint slides.

2) Save images to disk as JPG for the greatest amount of compression. TIF (or TIFF) and BMP formats are usually the largest sizes. GIF and PNG are somewhere in the middle.

3) Look for images hidden in Master Slide layouts. I often see presentations that keep getting additions with multiple master layouts. If the masters have large images, they can add to the file size without you seeing them. Once you have finalized your slides, eliminate all unused master slides. Efficiency tip: You can just starting deleting masters in sequence. PowerPoint automatically prevents you from deleting masters that are in use by slides.

4) To find the big images in your PowerPoint that are causing it to balloon in size, follow these steps:

a) Copy the PowerPoint file on your disk so you aren't working with the original.

b) Rename the file copy from PPT or PPTX to a ZIP extension. Windows will make you confirm the action. Go ahead.

c) Open the ZIP file and navigate to the ppt/media folder. Sort it in descending order of Compressed size.

d) Note any images that are larger than 1MB. There is no need for any image to be that large. You will have to open them and then look through your PowerPoint slides to see where they are in the presentation. (You can work your way down the list to smaller and smaller image sizes with correspondingly smaller gains in compression).

5) The ZIP method in (4) also shows you each image's format. If you saw that a large image had been inserted in BMP or TIF format, you can easily go back to your slide and right-click on the image. Choose "Save as Picture…" and change the save format to JPG. Then right-click the image again and choose "Change Picture…" Select the JPG you saved and it will retain the proper size and formatting. Even animations remain attached. [It may not be necessary, but before doing the save/change process I always change my view size to 100% so I know I am working with images at absolute size.]

THE NEXT STEPS SHOULD BE APPLIED TO A COPY OF THE POWERPOINT FILE. LEAVE YOUR FULL SIZE SOURCE INTACT IN CASE YOU NEED TO MAKE CHANGES.

6) Once you have finalized your presentation, look for charts, graphs, or tables linked to (generated from) live spreadsheet data. You can right-click them and save them as JPG images as well. You can't use "Change Picture" to reinsert them, so you'll have to manually insert the saved picture on the slide and delete the original. You need to do this step independently from the rest of your changes and compare file sizes before and after. Depending on the amount of data in your spreadsheet, the change to picture could decrease or increase the final file size!

7) Once you have manually swapped out the largest images, use PowerPoint's compression tool to automatically minimize everything else. Click an image and choose "Format: Compress Pictures." Uncheck "Apply only to this picture", check "Delete cropped areas" and choose Web (150 ppi) for the output size.

 

TIPS FOR WORKING WITH SLIDE DISPLAY IN WEB CONFERENCES

1) If your web conferencing software displays slides using screen sharing, look for animation effects and slide transitions that use movements such as Fly In/Out, Wipes, or Fades. These may not reproduce smoothly for attendees on slower networks or computers. You are safest using simple Appear/Disappear animations and no slide transition effects.

2) If your web conferencing software uses an upload/convert process to hold and display your slides, check every slide to make sure fonts are converted correctly and animation effects and slide transition effects are retained correctly. You may have to alter your slides to compensate for conversion errors or limitations.

3) If your web conference software can't show animation effects, you can simulate a sequence of builds, overlays, or disappear animations in PowerPoint. Start with the slide with all components on it. Duplicate the slide several times. Now go back and delete components from the slide on each successive copy. As you move from slide to slide, you should be able to recreate the effect of things appearing or disappearing. Don't worry about the large total number of slides you end up with… The effect and total presentation time is no different than a single slide with animations.

4) Some web conferencing products have problems converting PowerPoint SmartArt graphics. Those are highly complex and proprietary formats to PowerPoint. But once you have your slides finalized, you can right-click on the SmartArt image and choose "Convert to Shapes" (make sure to do this on a copy of the original so you can make changes to the source later if necessary). The image gets changed to standard PowerPoint graphics that your conferencing software will be able to handle.

 

TIPS FOR CREATING HANDOUTS OR REFERENCE NOTES

1) You can print your notes pages to a PDF document for a quick "eBook" version of your PowerPoint that shows slide graphics and speaker notes. You can also use a more complex series of steps to print just the slide notes to a text file for further editing or manipulation. I wrote an article about this with reference links all the way back in 2009. Check it out for details!

 

Hope you found some value and got some ideas from this list. I'd love to collect additional tips and suggestions in the Comments section. Don't be shy!

 

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

Adobe Connect Now Works Without Flash

I woulda thunk this deserved a press release, but you have to look on the Adobe Connect Blog to discover that the latest version of Adobe Connect allows users to download and install client software on their computer that permits attending a meeting, virtual classroom, or webinar without using Adobe Flash Player.

Although the article does not state it explicitly, I assume from context that the optional installed add-in only supports meeting attendees, and that presenters or hosts must still use the Flash version of Connect.

The new release is labeled 9.5.2, and it adds a few other features and bug fixes. One that hosts might like is the ability to upgrade licensed capacity for a webinar room on the fly without invalidating any existing link URLs. So if your 100-person webinar suddenly goes viral and 1,000 people register, you can upgrade your license and allow the larger capacity. There was no indication in the blog article about how easily or frequently you can adjust your licensing arrangement. The release notes show that you can't wait until the last minute though… A room can't be moved to a larger license within 45 minutes of its scheduled start time.

According to the release notes, 9.5.2 will be made available for on-premise installations beginning February 11. Customers using the hosted web version will be upgraded on a rolling basis starting February 7. Managed service customers will be able to work with their account manager to schedule an upgrade.

Truly, we are finally at the beginning of the end for Flash. Other web conferencing vendors who rely on Flash better be in serious development on alternate enabling technologies.

 

Technorati Tags: Adobe Connect,Adobe Flash,Flash Player,web conference,web conferencing,webinar,webcast,webcasting,web seminar,web meetings,online meeting,online seminar

Webinar Demos Webinar Demos

That title makes sense… eventually.

The free webinar I am giving on Wednesday, Feb 3 will demonstrate best practices for including demos in marketing webinars. In other words, my webinar demos how to do webinar demos.

Word play aside, this is a fun subject that I haven't presented in quite a while. It is specifically targeted for business marketers who use live product demos in their lead gen webinars. I used to do a lot of that when I handled product marketing for a Silicon Valley software manufacturer, so you'll be hearing tips based on practical experience.

I will discuss planning of the demo, proper integration of live demonstration with PowerPoint slides, presentation tips, and ways to work with differing audience expectations. Of course a lot of the tips are applicable to any live demonstration, but I will be framing things within a marketing context to keep it focused and relevant.

Adobe Connect invited me to be guest speaker and use their conferencing platform, so you will have the opportunity to check out how their technology handles the combination of slides, audio, and live screen sharing.

We are scheduled for one hour starting at 10am California / 1pm New York. Here's a short link you can use to register: http://j.mp/feb3demo

As always, I'll be answering questions during the session, so I'm looking forward to helping you with whatever aspects have been giving you difficulties. See you online!

 

Technorati Tags: Adobe Connect,webinar,web seminar,web conference,web conferencing,webcast,webcasting,lead generation,marketing,product demos,web meetings,online meeting

WebEx And PowerPoint - What Year Is This?

Cisco seems to have given up on making its presentation sharing mode work with any reasonably current version of PowerPoint. Details coming up, but first a few facts.

It is hard to get accurate market share figures for presentation software, but nobody would argue against Microsoft PowerPoint having the majority by a significant margin. A 2012 Bloomberg article by Bob Parks references a 95% share of the presentation software market (no source given). So proper handling and display of PowerPoint slides is critical for a web collaboration tool.

WebEx allows two ways to show PowerPoint slides to participants in a web meeting or webinar. One method is to share your desktop. What you see on your screen shows up on your attendees' screens. The other method has you upload your PowerPoint file to the conference room. Slides are converted for navigation and display in the web session.

Each method has its advantages and disadvantages. Either may be more suitable in a given meeting depending upon circumstances and preferences.

I usually prefer to load slides into the room rather than use screen sharing. With slides uploaded, you know there is no lag time between what you see as presenter and what the attendees see (slide images are cached for fast display). You can use WebEx presenter tools that let you preview thumbnail images of the slides and access them out of sequence. You can switch presenter control for who gets to navigate through the slides with no interruption or visible difference for attendees. And most importantly, once the slides are in the room, the presentation can continue to be driven by an alternate presenter even if the host gets disconnected.

In screen sharing mode you run the risk of unexpected visuals showing up in the display area. The person sharing the content must stay connected and must have fast and reliable uplink internet bandwidth. And unless you have a dual-monitor setup, you can have a hard time splitting screen space and working with controls such as chat panels, slide navigation, presenter notes, and so on.

WebEx has their own proprietary conversion algorithm for uploaded PowerPoint slides. I have no idea how it works. But it brings us back to the main point of this piece.

According to Cisco's WebEx support team and online Knowledge Base, PowerPoint 2010 is the only version of PowerPoint fully supported for file upload and sharing. With PowerPoint 2013 and 2016, WebEx converts slides to static images, throwing away all builds, animations, and transitions.

I was astonished to find that it doesn't matter which version of PowerPoint was used to create the slide deck. And you can't get around the issue by saving the presentation into the older 2003-compatible .PPT format. WebEx uses the version of PowerPoint loaded on the uploading computer… I guess it must call on some code in the Microsoft software during the upload process.

You can still choose to share your slides by running the PowerPoint on your computer in slideshow mode and sharing your monitor or application. But you have to accept the other limitations that go along with screen sharing - And you lose the ability to hear audio in embedded multimedia clips on slides (something the upload/convert process was previously able to accommodate).

Microsoft introduced PowerPoint 2013 in January 2013. PowerPoint 2016 was released for Windows in September 2015. That means WebEx is now behind the curve by two releases and a full three years. At this point, that's not a delay… It's a strategic decision.

 

Technorati Tags: Cisco WebEx,WebEx Meeting Center,WebEx Event Center,webinar,web seminar,web collaboration,web meetings,webcast,webcasting,web conference,web conferencing,online meeting,online presentations