Tip: Stop sharing your desktop for PowerPoint presentations

A very common scenario today is for a person to present a PowerPoint presentation to one or more remote attendees using some sort of web conferencing tool such as Live Meeting or Lync or Lync Online.

As a presenter, a quick and easy way show your presentations to participants is to just share your desktop…

Please don’t do this!  (For PowerPoint presentations, anyway)

Why Not?

I’ll address that, but first let me introduce the (better) alternative.  Now your tool of choice may not have this option, and sharing your desktop may be all you have, but with Lync you can upload the PowerPoint presentation into the meeting space…

Nice, but again, why not share my desktop?

OK, OK.  There are a number of reasons why I think sharing your desktop for PowerPoint presentations is not the best approach:

Privacy – Email alerts and Instant Message popups are all on display for the world to see when you simply share your desktop.  You may inadvertently reveal confidential information, or at best be embarrassed by something becoming public that was otherwise meant to be private such as “Hi Pumpkin-face, I miss you,” or the like.

Unprofessional Presentations – We often need to refer to other material or switch to different slides during the course of a presentation.  When your desktop is on display, these efforts are viewable to all.  As you drop back out of Presentation mode attendees see your slides and possibly speaker notes.  They see you browsing your file system looking for something.  You’re on display and feeling exposed so invariably it takes longer than it otherwise would and your mouse is hovering directly over the file in question but you can’t see it – everyone online is quietly pointing out the obvious and politely waiting for you to catch up.

Scrolling, Scrolling, Scrolling – When you share your desktop your screen resolution may not match those of the participants and therefore, without you realizing it, they have to constantly scroll to see your presentation.  This is very annoying and altogether unnecessary, as you’ll see later.

These are just a few of my thoughts on the experience of sharing your desktop for presentations.

So give me a better way!

Happy to.  With Lync, for example, if you upload the presentation instead of sharing your desktop you not only solve the problems noted above but now also enjoy the following benefits:

Annotations – Lync allows you (and optionally participants) to annotate the presentation adding a whole new dimension of real-time collaboration to your session.  You simply can’t do that if you are sharing your desktop.

Thumbnails – Need to jump ahead in your slides?  Instead of advancing through them in sequence or stepping out of Presentation mode, as you would have to do if you were sharing your desktop, you can see the list of thumbnails during your presentation and simply advance to the exact slide you want – the participants only see the slides you wish to share and don’t know if you are skipping slides or not.

Speaker Notes – What if you had speaker notes with important points to share?  Well, you could print them out or use some split-screen technology to hide them.  But with Lync it’s much easier as your speaker notes are available to you right on screen, and again, the participants do not see this.

Other Rich Content alongside your Slides – With a tool as powerful as Lync your online meetings may often include more than just a slide-sharing session.  If you share your desktop you must show only the presentation.  If you use the uploaded PowerPoint method you can continue to have access to the Instant Messaging conversation, Video, and the Visual Roster of participants.

Summary

So all in all you have a more controlled and feature rich experience as a presenter when you upload your PowerPoint presentations instead of sharing your desktop, and your participants enjoy a more professional and streamlined presentation.

Don’t get me wrong – sharing your desktop, or specific applications, is a powerful feature and should absolutely be used to its fullest potential but not, in my opinion, for presenting PowerPoint presentations.

Lync Management and Operations: Monitoring and Troubleshooting Lync Calls

I’d like to call your attention to a very useful set of videos covering Monitoring and Troubleshooting in Lync Server 2010, posted by our friends over at NextHop.

Unified Communications, by definition, brings together a number of different communications tools and applications which can make nailing down issues a very daunting task indeed.

Lync Server 2010 includes intuitive and powerful monitoring and reporting capabilities to help make this easier, and Microsoft has released some very useful videos to guide you through it.

Background

First of all, you should know about the Monitoring Server role in Lync Server 2010.  From TechNet…

Monitoring Server collects data about the quality of your network media, in both Enterprise Voice calls and A/V conferences. This information can help you provide the best possible media experience for your users. It also collects call error records (CERs), which you can use to troubleshoot failed calls. Additionally, it collects usage information in the form of call detail records (CDRs) about various Lync Server features so that you can calculate return on investment of your deployment, and plan the future growth of your deployment.  For details, see Planning for Monitoring in the Planning documentation.

Lync Server 2010 also ships with ready-to-go SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) Reports that help make understanding the health of your Lync environment that much easier.

The videos go into great detail on each of System-wide Troubleshooting: Lync Call Connectivity, Help Desk Troubleshooting: Lync Call Issues, and Monitoring and Managing Jitter for VoIP, but for this post I wanted to call out a few things that I really like.

Drilldown

The base Lync Server 2010 Monitoring Server report is actually a list of available reports…

…and clicking into a particular report gets you to the goods…

Now, nice glossy reports that show me what I want are great, but invariably I’ll want to ask that next question … “OK, here’s the list of things I wanted, but I want more details on this one and that one!”

In this example, clicking on one of the columns in the chart on the right gets me to the underlying detail for that data.

You can continue to click-through and get more details as you continue your troubleshooting.  Very easy and very intuitive!

Tooltips

Reports that show lots of information are great, but sometimes they show too much information, or by their very nature can’t show everything.  In the interest of readability and consumption, headings and titles must be used to lay out the data.

But what if you don’t know what the headings mean exactly?  To have to leave the report and go consult a guide or website is counter-productive and time-consuming.  A lethal combination when users are complaining.

In Lync Server 2010, the headings are built with handy tool tips … just mouse over the heading and get a full description of what that data and/or value means!

Highlights

So we’ve got the ability to get to the data easily and we have handy descriptions of what certain data sets are capturing.  But, and this is a big BUT, how do we know what the values mean?  Is a big number good or bad?  Same thing with small numbers.

You will build your expertise over time, but until then, Lync Server 2010 reports actually bring your attention to important data automatically by highlighting the data in the report!

To really take it over the top, mouse over the value and get a full description of, in the case below, the Diagnostic ID value that came back from the voice gateway…

Below you see another example of a report with lots of valuable data and the handy highlighting to help you focus on the most pertinent values to help you in your troubleshooting.  In this case, Lync Server 2010 is telling us that a value of 4% for Avg. concealed samples ratio is something that should be looked at further.

Summary

Lync Server 2010 Monitoring Server Reports include handy out-of-the-box features such as Drill-down, Tool Tips, and Highlighting that help make troubleshooting your Lync environment easier and more fun!  (As if troubleshooting wasn’t already fun, right!?)

So please do take a look at these videos as they give great return for a very short amount of time investment.  Enjoy!

http://blogs.technet.com/b/nexthop/archive/2011/10/10/monitoring-and-troubleshooting-lync-call-videos.aspx

Tip: View your Lync Contacts in a 1-line View

Lync 2010 introduces a more informative view of each contact in your buddy list, including Name, Availability Status, Personal Note, and Contact Photo.  It looks like this…

But what if you want to streamline your view a bit, and see only your contacts’ Name and Availability Status, similar to what you may have had using Office Communicator 2007 R2?

The trick is to change the display to Name View…

Your buddy list will no longer show Contact Photos, and instead switches to a 1-line view.

You can toggle between these views by clicking the Display Options icon, or click on the down-arrow at the right-hand side of the icon to see more Layout Options.

Enjoy!