Introduction

Prerequisite:

  • Microsoft Live Meeting 2007 training.

Software:

  • Microsoft Live Meeting 2007

Hardware for online collaboration:

  • A camera
  • a set of speakers
  • A microphone

Objectives:

This handout is intended to help you get acquainted with the use of Microsoft Live Meeting 2007 that can be used to:

  • Learn the mechanisms of logging in.
  • Learn to collaborate online with remote users.
  • Learn how to share application on your computer with the meeting attendee who is at a remote location.
  • Learn to use voice interactions as well as tools such as white board, polls and desktop sharing that come with Live Meeting.

What is Microsoft Live Meeting 2007?

Microsoft Office Live Meeting is a hosted Web conferencing service that connects and engages audiences in online meetings, training, and events through a reliable hosted service. The meeting attendees participate from their PCs and the presenter (or the meeting instructor) can deliver presentations, brainstorm ideas, edit files and collaborate on white board all from a remote location. The attendees can all be at different locations.

Using the Live Meeting tool, the instructor can share applications (like MS Office, Power Point) on his/her computer and communicate with the attendees using the VOIP. The instructor (or the meeting administrator) can also start a two way video and audio broad cast so that the attendees can also broadcast their video and audio. The administrator can assign the status of presenter to some of the attendees who will have rights similar to that of the administrator.

The Live Meeting suite has a number of feedback tools that can be used to engage the audience and to keep them involved in the session. It brings together multiple communication channels including live and recorded video, VOIP etc. that deliver a more immersive experience. The entire meeting sessions can be recorded for later review.

Instructional Use:

  • Audio and video maybe used to illustrate and explain concepts and supplement course material.
  • The application sharing can be used to share certain applications to give hands on training and a working example to demonstrate a skill or task.
  • The white board can be used to collaborate and exchange ideas among the attendees (students).
  • The live feedback may enable the presenter to adjust the speed and content according the needs of the audience.

Steps to create/ schedule a meeting

To create a meeting, the meeting has to be scheduled.

  1. To schedule a meeting, you have to login as an administrator to the Live Meeting Manager.
  2. You will be directed to a Home page when you login.
  3. Click on Schedule Meetingto schedule a meeting.

  1. Enter the email id’s of the meeting attendees separated by semi-colons. Enter the email ids of members that you wish to assign presenter roles in the presenters’ column.

  1. You can give a start and end time for the meeting and enable audio conferencing. The audio conferencing can be using VOIP or using teleconferencing. The audio conferencing can be one way or two ways.
  2. The meeting organizer can control how the attendees and presenters enter and leave the meeting, how the applications are shared and other meeting features by selecting the features from Meeting Options.
  3. After you have selected the time and set the meeting options to the desired levels, you can send invitations to the meeting participants or save the settings to send invitations later.
  4. Invitations can be sent through live meeting or from your email clients.

Join Meeting

  1. The invitation emails sent by LiveMeeting contains urls for the attendees and the presenters with their Entry codes.
  2. The meeting creator gets a confirmation page with the presenter and attendee urls

  1. The presenter or the meeting creator can join the meeting by clicking on Join Meeting. LiveMeeting will prompt for a meeting ID and an Entry Code.

  1. Join the meeting by clicking on Join. This will start the LiveMeeting session.

Using the LiveMeeting Features

Once you start the meeting, you can start audio and video conferencing, share content, administer polls, get feedback and ask questions. The LiveMeeting is console is easy to navigate. An explanation of how to use these features is given below:

  1. Start/ End an audio or video conference. There are two ways to start video or audio conferencing as shown below. You can start the conferencing by clicking on the webcam, phone or speaker icon on the top right corner of the window or by clicking on the audio & video section in the menu bar.

  1. To share an application running on your computer click on content on the menu bar. On the expanded menu, click on share a program to get a list of applications that currently open and running on your computer. You can share these applications to work with the application in collaboration with the attendees.

  1. You can share the white board by clicking on content -> share -> whiteboard. The white board can be used brainstorm ideas. Whiteboard has a tool box that contains freehand drawing tool, text box and a highlighter.
  1. You can invite attendees after starting the meeting and administer control over people joining and leaving the meetings by clicking on invite or meeting menus.
  1. To exit or end a meeting, you can close the window or click on meeting and then exit.