Using Interactive Online Meetings
In addition to presentation broadcasts, PowerPoint also provides a much more interactive way of sharing your ideas with others: online meetings. PowerPoint has had interactive meeting features for some time. For example, you can use PowerPoint's Meeting Minder (Tools, Meeting Minder) to jot down minutes and action items while you're presenting to a group of people. Online meetings take the concept of interactive presentations online, where you can bring together a group of people from around the world to present your ideas and then discuss them.
Just as with presentation broadcasts, online meetings enable you to show your live presentation to others, including real-time audio and video commentary. However, online meetings also let your audience in on the action. Instead of passively watching your presentation, participants in a PowerPoint online meeting can jot down ideas on a shared whiteboard; interactively send messages back to you and the group; and even take control of the presentation in midstream, make some changes to the presentation, and then give control back to you. Online meetings are much better suited to roundtable discussions and for immediate decision making than presentation broadcasts are.
Starting an Online Meeting
The first step in starting an online meeting is to open the presentation you want to present in the meeting. Then choose Tools, Online Collaboration, Meet Now to start the program PowerPoint uses for online meetings. This group collaboration tool, called Microsoft NetMeeting, is installed as part of Microsoft Office.
Note
If for some reason you don't have NetMeeting installed on your computer, you can download it from the Microsoft Web site (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ netmeeting). This site also includes detailed information and resources about NetMeeting. If you've never used this application before, you should familiarize yourself with its basic functionality before you start an online meeting in PowerPoint.
If you've run NetMeeting before, the Find Someone dialog box opens (see Figure 18.15).
If you haven't used NetMeeting before, the NetMeeting dialog box will ask for your name, e-mail address, and your NetMeeting directory server. You can choose any server you want from the list, or you can type in your company's private NetMeeting directory server (ask your network administrator for its name). All the people that will be joining this meeting have to log in to the same NetMeeting server, however, so you'll have to let your audience know which server to use ahead of time.
Setting up an online meeting in NetMeeting is different from running a broadcast presentation. Instead of letting your audience come to you, you need to bring in people one by one, just as in a telephone conference call.
Figure 18.15. Conference someone into your meeting by typing his or her name and then choosing Call.
The Find Someone dialog box gradually displays a long list of logged-in users as NetMeeting downloads the server user list.
Caution
The most common problem at this point is that your selected server might become too busy to handle numerous login requests, for both your meeting and other parties'meetings. If this happens, participants should just try to log in again by selecting that server's name from the Directory box.
Type in the name of the person you want to conference in to your online meeting to quickly jump to his or her name in the list. When you've found the person you want to call, select that name and then click the Call button.
NetMeeting tries to make the connection and, if the other person accepts the call, the Find Someone dialog box disappears, and the Online Meeting toolbar appears (see Figure 18.16).
Figure 18.16. The Online Meeting toolbar provides all the tools for con ducting your online meeting.
Can't get online meetings to work? See the “Troubleshooting” section near the end of the chapter.
Joining an Online Meeting
If you want to have more than two people in the meeting, just call more people by clicking the Call Participant button on the Online Meeting toolbar, and repeat the process. Your guests can also call in on their own using NetMeeting. If they do, they'll be told that you're in a meeting, but they can ask to join the meeting. You, as the meeting host, are then notified of an incoming call and asked whether you'd like to accept it.
Presenting Your Ideas
After you have all the right people connected at the same time (which can take some effort, depending on how busy the NetMeeting servers are), you're ready to start presenting.
Each of the people you've called (or who have called you) now see on their screen an exact duplicate of what's on your PowerPoint screen. This is a live view, so whatever you do appears on all the meeting attendees'screens—all your menu choices, mouse movements, typing, everything.
Sound is the one exception, however. Any transition sounds you have in your presentation won't be sent over the broadcast because the NetMeeting software is already using your sound hardware for itself.
Tip from
Consider using your phone to do an audio conference call along with the online meeting to get around the sound limitations.
Right now, with the exception of sound, you've got close to the same result as you would have had using a broadcast presentation. What's really different about the NetMeeting approach is that it enables other meeting attendees to interact with each other.
Using Online Chat and Whiteboards
The easiest way for online meeting participants to interact is through NetMeeting's chat window. Click the Display Chat Window button of the Online Meeting toolbar to open the chat window (see Figure 18.17). You can send a text message to everyone in the meeting by typing whatever you want into the Message box and then clicking the Send button.
Figure 18.17. A chat window makes it easy to communicate with everyone at the same time in an online meeting.
You can also open a graphical whiteboard by clicking the Display Whiteboard button; the whiteboard works just like the chat window (except you can draw on it). Figure 18.18 illustrates the whiteboard.
Enabling Online Group Editing
The ultimate form of interaction in online meetings goes even further than chat and whiteboard windows, however. With your permission, meeting participants can take direct control of your PowerPoint window and type as if they were sitting at your desk. This is a great way of creating a presentation together—if someone is having a hard time getting across what she'd really like to see, she can take control and drive for a while.
Figure 18.18. A whiteboard is another online collaboration tool.
To enable application sharing, you, as meeting host, have to tell PowerPoint it's okay for others to take control. Click the Allow Others to Edit button on the Online Meeting toolbar to do so.
The other people in the meeting can now double-click the image of your screen (displayed in their monitors) and take control. They'll be able to type right into the presentation open on your computer, add new slides, change slide order, and anything else you could do by yourself.
To take back control, just click anywhere in your PowerPoint window. You might want to turn off the Allow Others to Edit button just so people don't accidentally take control. It can be tricky to know who's in control sometimes.
Note
Note that application sharing doesn't require that anyone but the meeting host have PowerPoint installed on his computer. The only software other people need to have is NetMeeting.
Tip from
You can tell who's in control when using application sharing by looking for that person's initials in tiny letters at the bottom right of the mouse pointer.
Ending an Online Meeting
To end an online conference, click the End Meeting button on the Online Meeting toolbar. Individual attendees (except for you, the meeting host) can individually join and leave as they like during the meeting; the host facilitates these entries and exits. When you end the meeting, everyone gets disconnected.
Scheduling an Online Meeting
Although the method we've covered here enables you to start an online meeting whenever you want, PowerPoint also has hooks into Outlook that make it easy to schedule an online meeting.
Choose Tools, Online Collaboration, Schedule Meeting. PowerPoint starts an Outlook meeting request, which includes a specified online meeting directory server location and your e-mail address (see Figure 18.19). You can even have Outlook automatically start NetMeeting when the meeting begins.
Figure 18.19. Schedule a future online meeting using Outlook.
