The Webinar Blog

Citrix GoTo Merges With LogMeIn To Form GetGo

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the emergence of a new name for the Citrix "GoTo" family of collaboration products. Today Citrix and LogMeIn announced that they are merging their online collaboration products into a new combined company.

I was interested to read that the new company will be headquartered in Boston and will be run by the LogMeIn management team as a subsidiary of LogMeIn. Bill Wagner and Ed Herdiech will retain their current titles from LogMeIn as CEO and CFO, respectively. The Board of Directors will have five current board members from LogMeIn and four members to be appointed by Citrix.

According to presentation slides on the LogMeIn investor relations page, LogMeIn has estimated 2016 revenues of around $330 million and the GoTo products have estimated 2016 revenues of around $680 million. According to the slide, the combined billion-dollar-plus company will be in the top 10 of global SaaS companies by annual revenue.

LogMeIn has offices around the world, but based on the job listings I mentioned in my previous post, it looks like San Francisco is about to emerge as a major development center for the new collaboration software side of things.

 

UPDATE AUGUST 27, 2016: I received an email from Lauren Van Dam, the PR Manager at LogMeIn. She asked me to clarify that the GetGo name used by Citrix for the spinoff of the collaboration products has NOT been selected as the brand name for the combined company. GetGo will be formed as a spun-off Citrix business and immediately merge with a wholly-owned subsidiary of LogMeIn, with the combined entity itself then being a wholly owned subsidiary of LogMeIn operating under a name that has yet to be determined.

 

Technorati Tags: LogMeIn,Citrix,Citrix Online,GetGo,GoToMeeting,GoToWebinar,GoToTraining,web conferencing,webcasting,online collaboration,web collaboration

Formatting PowerPoint Notes For Handouts

In my post on "Creating Handouts From PowerPoint Slides" I showed how to publish PowerPoint notes pages to PDF for distribution to attendees after a presentation. Many people fail to realize that they do not need to stick with the default PowerPoint formatting for slides and notes in the export. You can adjust the look of notes pages just as you can change the look of presentation slides.

Look under the View command in PowerPoint and you'll see not only the Slide Master you are probably familiar with, but a Notes Master.

Clicking Notes Master brings up an editable master that is separate from the one used when you design and display your slides. It is only used for displaying and printing notes pages.

Notice that in this example Notes Master, I changed the orientation from Portrait to Landscape and included a number of parameters above and below the slide image (such as Date, Page Number, Header, and Footer). I select those options from a Notes Master tab that shows up in this editing mode:

Once I have selected the elements I want to include on my notes pages, I can change their settings using Insert Header and Footer:

In this case I made the date a fixed value rather than letting the computer change it every time I print.

Looking back at my master, I also chose to extend the height of the notes body text and centered the text vertically in the frame. My last design choice was to put a slight gray background behind the notes text and add similarly filled boxes above and below the slide. You can make any design choices you want… This just gives you an idea of what's possible.

Now when I print the notes pages of my presentation, they come out looking like this:

That makes for a nice PDF "book" you can distribute after your webinar.

If you start playing with notes masters, you will soon discover that PowerPoint has some quirks in practical use. It really feels like the development team at Microsoft didn't fully test the feature in operation.

If you insert slides from another presentation with a different notes master, unpredictable things occur. It may pick up some of the new settings and some of the old settings. If you make changes to your notes master, some or all of your slides may not update their content to match the changes. You need to right-click the slide while in Notes View and choose "Notes Layout…" followed by "Reapply master."

Amazingly, there is no way to reapply the master to all slides at once. You have to bring up every slide individually and reapply the master by hand. It's maddening and inexplicable. I have also seen cases where after you reapply the master, the slide image disappears. You need to use the Notes Layout menu to manually re-check the "Slide image" box.

Despite these frustrations, redesigning your notes masters can create a better-looking leave-behind for your attendees. Give it a try!

 

Technorati Tags: PowerPoint design,Notes Master,webinar,web seminar,online seminar,web meetings,online meeting,web conference,web conferencing,webcast,webcasting,presentation design

Creating Handouts From PowerPoint Slides

It has been seven years since I covered this topic in my blog, and it's time for a revisit to some "top tips" for turning slide presentations into handouts.

I won't belabor the old chestnuts you should already know and live by…

• If you can just print your slides and use them as a handout, you have lousy presentation slides. Your slides SHOULD need additional explanation, otherwise what is your role as a speaker? Make a handout that adds more than just your presentation display content.
• Yes, people often request copies of the presentation ahead of time "so they can take notes as you speak." Don't do it. It undermines the effectiveness of your talk.

One easy way to add explanatory text to your slides when you print them is to place text boxes right on the slides themselves. I learned this trick at one of the annual Presentation Summit conferences when Nolan Haims presented it. You can watch Nolan's presentation on YouTube, explaining this tip and many other valuable design techniques.

The trick is to add two animations to your print-only text elements and make them the first animations on the slide:

1. Appear (With Previous)
2. Disappear (With Previous)

When you run the slide in slideshow mode, the elements effectively appear and disappear instantly, so viewers see nothing. But printing ignores the animations and the elements get printed with all the other slide content. Very cool!

If you use this technique in a webinar, make SURE to test the slide display to verify that the animations show up in the conference room the way you expect. Web conferencing products are notorious for ignoring or altering animation effects.

The second technique takes more work, but produces a more sophisticated handout. Instead of placing additional explanatory text on the slides, use PowerPoint's speaker notes to write out the explanatory text in full sentences and paragraphs. Instead of jotting quick notes for yourself, write in "book format" so the display slide acts as an illustration accompanying each page of text, just as it acts as an illustration for your live speech when you are presenting live.

Now you can save the notes pages as a PDF, effectively creating an "eBook" electronic document of your entire topic.

I used to save the notes pages by using the PowerPoint Print command and choosing the destination as PDF. But the output quality is poor. I find I get much cleaner PDF files by using the PowerPoint Export command and choosing "Create PDF/XPS."

Make sure to click the "Options…" button and change "Publish what" from Slides to Notes pages.

 

In my next post I'll add some additional tips about formatting your notes pages to make them look better as a handout.

 

Technorati Tags: PowerPoint design,presentation tips,handouts,slide design,webinar,web seminar,web conference,web conferencing,webcast,webcasting,online seminar,online conference,web meetings,Nolan Haims

Web Conferencing For Small And Medium Businesses

This Thursday I'll be giving a short overview of web conferencing and its benefits for small and medium businesses. It often seems that we in the industry spend all our time talking about big enterprise-level webinars and webcasts, to the point where some smaller companies feel like the technology is too complex or costly for them. The truth is that it's not very difficult to move up from phone conferences to web conferences, and there are many uses that go beyond enterprise lead generation and customer training.

AT Conference (our hosts) asked me to pitch my material at an introductory level, so I'll be covering basic definitions, uses for web meetings and web events, fundamental considerations when starting to use web conferencing, and some of the capabilities that first-time users may not know about. We're keeping the presentation short… just 30 minutes, with another 15 minutes reserved for answering questions "live on the air."

The webinar is scheduled for Thursday the 21st at 11am California time, 2pm New York time. You can register at http://bit.ly/atsmb21

If you are in a smaller-sized company and have wondered about what it takes to put on a webinar, webcast, or web meeting, this is for you!

Technorati Tags: AT Conference,SMB,web conference,web conferencing,webinar,web seminar,online conference,webcast,webcasting,online meeting,web meetings

Citrix Names Collaboration Spinoff - GetGo

I have been watching for news of the new spinoff company for the line of collaboration products currently clustered under the Citrix Online operating division (GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, GoToTraining…). Citrix announced last November that the products would be spun off to a new, publicly-traded company.

At the time, I wrote that it was encouraging to see that the products would continue to be under the control of the people already familiar with their sales, support, and development. But my big question was whether operations would still be based in Goleta (near Santa Barbara, California) or would move to a new location, causing disruption to the workforce.

I still haven't seen any official name announcement, but a little search engine sleuthing turned up numerous job listings for "Citrix GetGo" on both the Citrix employment page and on third-party job sites. It looks like the new company will be headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area. I saw some listings mentioning San Francisco itself as the location, while others mentioned alternate locations in Mountain View, Santa Clara, and Redwood City.

Just as one example, I can point to a Citrix job listing for VP DESIGN & USER EXPERIENCE, Citrix GetGo (aka "The GoTo Business").

The company blurb reads as follows:

Citrix GetGo

In November 2015, Citrix announced the spinoff of its GoTo family of products, including the industry leading communication and collaboration offerings GoToMeeting, GoToAssist, GoToMyPC, GoToWebinar, Grasshopper and OpenVoice. Together, these products will be the center of a new standalone business known as Citrix GetGo.

At Citrix GetGo, our mission is to create a more human, more intelligent way to connect. For over 10 years, we’ve been studying people and building delightful communications solutions for people and businesses around the globe. We have a deep understanding of how people want to work and a powerful product portfolio with technology built for business, but designed for people. Our tools enable our more than 2 million users to host nearly 200 million meetings/ events a year and connect with over 30 million participants.  As we go forward, we are passionate about surfacing the intelligence underlying those communications, to deepen human connections and unleash our users to do amazing things.

We will be a leading, pure-play SaaS company with over $600 million in revenue that is strategically positioned for sustained, profitable growth.

That's as official as I need! GetGo also has a placeholder Facebook page that has no content yet and still places its location as Citrix HQ in Goleta. Another search turned up the official trademark application for the word mark in all caps.

The move from Southern California to Northern California will be a two-edged sword. It means that many experienced employees won't be willing or able to uproot and move with the company, so some product expertise and employee continuity may be lost. But being in the heart of the Bay Area tech community will let the company have access to a large workforce of cutting-edge software talent.

I expect we'll start seeing announcements fairly soon, along with a big marketing campaign to rebrand all the web conferencing products. But until then… You heard it here first!

 

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

Update - Getting WebEx Reminder Emails To Work

Back on June 23 I posted about problems I was having with a client's WebEx Event Center webinar. Registered attendees did not receive reminder emails through the WebEx system. I can now report the successful resolution of the issue.

If you encounter a similar problem, have your designated WebEx account administrator log into Site Administration. Look under "Configuration - Common Site Settings - Options" and scroll down to "Default Scheduler Options." There is an On/Off setting for "Meeting email reminders (MC, TC and EC)." Make sure the option is set to "On".

That seems simple enough, but I experienced great frustration in dealing with WebEx technical support representatives in tracking down the root cause. My first rep told me that I had simply forgotten to check the boxes to send reminders in my event setup:

We went back and forth on this contention, and I finally managed to convince them that I had the event reminder boxes checked by creating a new event and taking a snapshot as above. So they asked me to look at the master account administration options. Changing it to ON seemed to work, but then another Senior Support Engineer was assigned to the case and he wrote:

"The Meeting email reminders (MC, TC and EC) setting only affects HOSTS, that is, only hosts will receive the reminder emails for meetings. Attendees reminders can only be configured for Event Center Sessions when scheduling them, this option can be found at the bottom of the page."

So we were right back to square one. It took me additional tests on my account to verify that the account admin option was indeed blocking or permitting the attendee reminders to go out. Having it set to OFF overrode any checked settings in the event itself.

I don't believe this is how it used to work, as I know my client had not changed their master account admin options, and reminders used to go out on our events. The parenthetical text on the admin options also seems to indicate that WebEx expects the setting only to be a default that can be overridden in the event. But I have no way to prove previous vs. current behavior and no interest in playing with it anymore.

I'll just put the solution out there in case it helps someone with similar problems.

 

Technorati Tags: WebEx,WebEx Event Center,webinar,web seminar,web event,webcast,webcasting,web meetings,online seminar,online event,web conference,web conferencing