Facilities   Products
 

 

 
Conferral

Desktop - Application Sharing

« Video Conferencing | Main | Remote Control »

Conferral integrates a full screen-sharing facility, that goes beyond application sharing by offering also the option for a live co-editing mode.

To start screen-sharing the presenter needs to click on the "Conference Now" button accessible in the Conferral mini control center or on Screen Confer in the Conferral system tray icon.

The screen sharing facility is labeled Screen-Confer and once selected, one needs only to decide whether to share the whole contents of the presenter PC or the ones of a specific application.

As an option, it is possible for the presenter to set the color depth of session to only 8-bits of color depth. This means that the screen sharing is performed by taking rapid sequential pictures of the presenter screen but never using more than 256 colors for each mage. This increases significantly the performance of the screen sharing session (the time it takes for each attendee to receive the updated screen changes from the presenter's screen), allowing remote attendees on a slow connection to have shorter wait time before seeing the content shown on the presenter PC.

Conferral_reduce_colors.gif

Conferral_start_a_conference_screenconfer.gif

The screen sharing session can be easily stopped at any time by the presenter. A "pause" button is accessible within the drop-down menu accessible in the floating Conferral Conference Control.

Conferral_pause_screen_conference.gif

Alternatively the presenter can click directly on the small green rectangle showing on the top right area of the floating Conferral Conference Control.

Conferral_pause_screen_conference2.gif

Conferral utilizes an innovative and effective method to signal the presenter the presentation modality she is in at any time. By utilizing different colors in the Screen Confer floating window top bar, Conferral reports the specific status in which the presenter is operating.

- Blue indicates that the conference is in Present Live or Show Video

- Green indicates that you the screen is being shared with Screen Confer or Revise Live

- Yellow indicates that the shared application is not the one in the active window.

- Red indicates that Screen Confer or Revise Live have been paused and that therefore attendees cannot see the presenter screen at this time.

The Conferral "Revise Live" feature adds the option to provide remote control and editing access to your documents to facilitate co-editing sessions. The feature is accessible from the contextual menus that Conferral places within Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel.

To use the feature the presenter needs to select Revise Live from the Confer Menu appearing within those applications.

After Conferral will have prompted the presenter to close all "sensitive" document windows need not be shown publicly, the host is offered the option of addressing a ready-made email message to invite your meeting partner(s) to join in her live editing session.

Once the attendee has joined the host online, the presenter can enable co-editing by double-clicking on the attendee name in the Attendee List. A two-way icon (characterized by two colored looping arrows) will show up next to the attendee to whom remote control has been provided. The icon indicates that remote control of the presenter keyboard and mouse has been granted to the selected attendee.

On the selected attendee's screen a 'Take Control' button will appear on the blue Conferral menu bar. When the attendee clicks on the button, keyboard/mouse control is effectively enabled.

For the presenter to revoke editing control by the attendee is sufficient to double-click again on the Two-Way icon in the Attendee List.



Cons:

  1. The presenter cannot hand-out presentation rights to other participants. No-one but the presenter can show her desktop or any specific application to the other attendees.
  2. When sharing the entire desktop attendees get to see the presenter controls as well. This should be ideally hidden from view and displayed only optionally.

 

« Video Conferencing | Main | Remote Control »


Posted on September 27, 2005 at 11:27 AM

Updated on October 12, 2005 at 10:07 AM

 

 

Desktop - Application Sharing

 

 

Conferral

 

About | Full Guide Access | Table of Contents | Last Updates Last Updates Of Robin Good's Official Guide To Web Conferencing