On WebCasts and Dead Meeting

 I just sat through another Microsoft Webcast using their heavily touted Live Meeting software. At this point (after my nth Webcast) I think they should rename the product “Dead Meeting”. The interface is easy enough to use, but the audio is spotty—even when the presenter speaks native English. No, I can't afford to tie up my business line for an hour so that I can hear better. Thankfully, the last couple of sessions had easily understood speakers.

During the session, the feedback you get to provide does not let you do much but ask for help or speak up. What about a “please clarify this point” flag? It would be very nice if we were given the slides ahead of time so we could print them and take notes on the slides. Of course, that’s for the slides where the presenter does not simply read the content. It would be even nicer if the interface let us take notes in context with the slides and save this annotated file locally.

As to the questions we get to ask, that’s the biggest problem. I like to ask questions in context to get clarification of points as we go. The Live Meeting interface permits attendees to ask one (and only one) question at a time. If the presenter (or whomever) does not respond to the question you can’t ask another. What I end up doing is editing my question and appending another question. This makes it tough(er) on the presenter as they don’t have the context for the question and have moved on to other topics. Perhaps if there was an on-site moderator to read and acknowledge the questions, put them in the queue, compile them and ask the presenter to respond at the end of every (few) slides. Sure, this might take a bit longer to do, but the end result would be far more useful.

And another tip for the presenters. You need to turn hardware optimizations OFF during the presentations. If you don't some of the graphics and other slide content are not rendered correctly on our end.