Carl Tyler's Blog :: Holy Cow, another Sametime hint and tip...

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We've probably all been in them, a bad Sametime WebEx meeting, well here are my hints for delivering a good Sametime/WebEx presentation:

If your audience are running on average screens with a resolution of 1024x768, don't run your screen at 1024x768, run your screen at 800x600, this has a couple of benefits, if you do a presentation or screenshare it all fits on their screen without them having to do a resize or hit the fit to screen button (which slows down performance)
Reduce your colour depth, Don't leave your screen in 32bit colour mode, it has a huge impact on performance, Consider 16bit the maximum to use.
Avoid Presentations with animations, I have yet to see a presentation with animation from anyone where it adds value and isn't a distraction, and the best that happens in a Sametime or even WebEx meeting is it slows things down.
Turn of any fancy Windows desktop image, if it has lots of complexity and lots of colours it will take longer to send it across.
Choose the right presentation type, if the people you are presenting to are not going to interact then choose a broadcast meeting and not a collaboration meeting for example.
Turn off the features you don't need. If you're not going to use polling, web page push, or polling etc. turn them off.
Have a test meeting running all the time, when you send someone the URL to a future meeting, send them the URL to the test meeting asking them to test their connection, and browser capabilities before hand etc.
Enable Tunneling on the Sametime server, if their firewall has open ports then great, if not then typically the tunneling can get through.
Don't bother using the current Audio/Video capabilities, great in a demo or a 1-1 presentation, but terrible in pretty much every other usage scenario.
Avoid using the mouse or dragging windows around too much, Remember how Sametime draws it screen, it's split into 9 squares, 3 across and 3 down, if something changes in a single box it sends down the data for that single box, if you change something across a large area of the screen, it has to send down every box that changed back across.
If demonstrating Notes, and using the Workspace, turn off the textured workspace, it has a huge impact on screenshare performance.

Hopefully this will help someone along the way...

Comments

1 - OMG, I feel like such a dope! I have only routinely used *ONE* of these techiques (turning off the A/V). The poor users have had to contend with my fancy wallpaper, textured workspace, high-color, scrolling, etc., etc. Fortunately, I attended Catholic schools for 9 years, so I've been punished enough; otherwise, I would think myself a good candidate for a flogging.

Thanks for the extremely practicle tips!