The other day I attended and presented at my first virtual VMUG. The event was for the Manitoba VMUG. The presentation was a new one all called “From Zero to Colo: My vCloud Lab” that covers my “journey” (yes, that word again!) in terms of the various guises of my home lab and how I’ve been reshapping it as part of my preparation for taking the VCP-Cloud exam. The presentation was done from the comfort and safety of my home office. Although it would have been nice to actually visit Canada – not having to meant I could be at yesterdays “Virtual Machine User Group” in Leeds (not to be confused with the offical VMware User Groups by the way).
There was nothing spectualar about the setup – just webex with webcams. Sadly, we had some audio problems and little bit of latency to contend with. So if you thinking of doing this for your own VMUG. I’ve got some tips especially if you have bandwidth issues or long round-trips…
1. Start off with webcam on the presenters side on, and that VMUG side on. With the VMUG webcam pointed at the audience. This means the speaker and the audience can see each other. Don’t bother with the presentation at this stage.
2. Once the remote presenter has done their welcome turn off the webcams, and turn the VMUG to point at the projector view. This means the presenter can actually see what kind of lag there is. This was really useful in my session because I could see there was anything upto 10-20second of lag between me hitting the keyboard in the UK, and the slides progressing in Manitoba! Once I relised this I could time my spacebar hits to coincide with me coming to the end of what I had to say previously. I don’t use heavily annimated slides – and given potential lag I think this is a good idea. To many annimations makes it difficult for you to make sure you narration matches the annimation…
3. Once the presentation is completed. Turn of presentation/screen sharing. Switch webcams back on. VMUG webcam to pointed back at the group – for QA/Sign-off…
Basically we had web-ex, skype and webcams on both sides all the time – and think it chewed up some bandwidth. That lead to some call quality issues…
4. Get a clock for your office. Chatting away on a webex you can loose track of time – I used 45mins, but my speaking slot was 30mins. Opps
5. Backup. On the presenters side use “Screenflow”, Camtasias or QuickTime’s own screen recording facilty. This means a recording of the presentation can be shared – if there are comms problems that make audio quality an issue.
6. Whatever you choice for audio – makes sure you stay on one format. So you are either both on Skype or both WebEX – I think we had issues because as ever webEX can hijack your audio setttings, which means you can’t get other software to work properly…