April 2006 Archives

>>> Lawrence Lippke Fri, Apr 21, 2006 10.50 pm >>>
We've applied a new license key to our Centra server which turned on the ability to use both Centra Conference and Centra eMeeting. I do not yet know all the differences between Symposium and these other products, but have messed with them enough to give me the following general idea. In my comments below, I try to describe what is different from Symposium.

Conference: From the presenter's perspective, the toolbar is missing the "Begin", Feedback, Whiteboard, and Breakout functions. Conference is designed for large groups or other groups where the amount of interaction is not expected to be very great. One can hide the list of all the participants, but when they hold up their hands, their names appear in the participants box in the order they held up their hands. You can then recognize them, and they still have access to markup tools when their microphones are on. However, it appears you can only give one person at a time a microphone, and you cannot elevate a participant to presenter status.

eMeeting: From the presenter's perspective, the toolbar is missing only the Begin and Breakout functions. One can schedule a meeting just as you can with Symposium or Conference, or you can start one immediately. When creating the meeting, the person creating it is automatically the leader, and this meeting creator can input email addresses of people invited to participate in the meeting. You don't create the meeting from the Events Manager, but from a menu item on the left side of the screen. The number of people one can invite to a meeting is determined in the user profile; i.e., you can disallow some people from using meeting by putting a "0" in the Meeting parameter in the user profile, and you can limit how many they can invite in the same way. You do not advance register participants, except through entering their email addresses, but you can have them participate by providing them an event ID, and having them enter that ID when following an "Attend Meeting" link. Once the eMeeting session has started, the in-session functions are nearly equivalent to Symposium.

Anybody can set up their own account and attend a centra event.

employees, colleagues, volunteers. . .
just make sure they run a system check!

There are ways to not make an event available to just anyone,like unchecking the option to show event on public events list if that's important. Most people have other things to do than rummaging thru our centra events looking for something to attend, though :)

I used breakout rooms! Finally. It wasn't too exciting, really, mainly because I only had 5 people in 2 rooms, but it worked. I think I'll try it AGAIN this week :)

I want to be able to play something like Flash or a producer movie in centra and so far have not been able to have participants hear the audio. Last time I application shared, but I wonder if I unlocked my leader mic? That might mess things up...