LiveMeeting Tips and Tricks

As a virtual chapter leader and presenter I end up using LiveMeeting quite a good deal. I also like to attend PASS meetings through LiveMeeting (free learning is free and learning). As I’ve presented and talked to other presenters, I’ve amassed a list of feedback, tips, and tricks for successfully using LiveMeeting.

• Make sure you’re in a quiet place – You may not notice barking dogs, noisy cube neighbors on speakerphone, or a stereo on in the background, but these things can be distracting for the audience.
• Lower your display resolution to 1024 x 768 – most people are watching this in a window or on their work computer or both. In my experience, work computers have low resolutions. My personal laptop has a 13 inch display at 1280 x 800 pixels.
• Reboot your computer and only start the programs you need for your presentation – PowerPoint and SSMS, for example. Close everything you don’t need. Close all of the tray apps you don’t need. Shut down every service that you don’t need. Your computer is doing some heavy duty audio and video encoding and you don’t need anything else potentially eating up your CPU.
• Increase your Visual Studio/SSMS font sizes to at least a 12pt font.
• Upload your slide deck – click Content -> Upload a File. Your attendees will get much better results if you just upload the slide deck instead. This will fill their monitor, unlike your display which probably won’t match theirs. The downside: you won’t have your slide notes, so print those out ahead of time. Event when I’m presenting in person I do this, just in case I can’t get my laptop and the projector to play nicely and I have to mirror my display.
• If you have multiple monitors and you want to share a single program, it needs to be on the primary display.
• If you’re using the video conferencing feature, turn of any lights behind you and turn on lights in front of you. I also set my desktop background to a pure white background. This will light up your face and make you appear less like a member of the witness protection program.
• Turn of your cell phone. Ever get a goofy galloping noise on your speakers at home? That’s the magic of GSM. That will play havoc with the audio in your LiveMeeting.
• Speaking of phones – make sure your cellular or cordless phone is fully charged. Have a backup plan. This, of course, does not apply if you are using LiveMeeting’s audio stream.
• Use throat lozenges to keep your voice working, especially if you are presenting or recording multiple sessions on a single day. Coffee will not do wonders for your voice.
• Install LiveMeeting in advance. Preferably several days in advance. It takes about 10 minutes to install on a good day, so give yourself plenty of time.
• Put a note in the slide notes every few slides that simply says “stop and ask for questions”. At that point in the presentation, click the Q&A button at the top of the screen and click Manage. You’ll see everybody’s questions. Remind the audience that they can ask questions throughout the presentation by clicking Q&A at the top of their screen.
• If you have two computers, set them both up as presenters, but mute the audio on your secondary one. Then if all hell breaks loose, you can switch laptops and keep going.

Special thanks to Brent Ozar for collaborating on this list of tips. Do you have any LiveMeeting tips that you would like to share? Spread the love in the comments!

Bonus Tip: Use basic fonts for maximum readability – Core fonts for the Web