EarthLink Conference Manager

Contents

• Overview
• User interface quick guide
• Get an account (It's Free!)
• Sign-in
• Conferencing
  • Join an existing conference
  • The video window
  • Create a conference
  • Inviting others to join a conference
  • Sharing files
  • Calling a party
• Private Chat
• Advanced Topics
  • Dealing with consumer-grade firewalls
  • Customize sounds
  • Using RAT, the audio media handler
  • Audio configuration
• Getting help
• Suggested uses

Overview

Conference Sessions. You can participate in a Conference Session. A Conference Session provides a context for communication and document sharing. Conference Manager allows people to gather in Conference Sessions to talk using text chat and videoconferencing. Conference Sessions are also the basis for file and document sharing. Users can place files of different types into a Conference Session, allowing anyone else participating in that Conference Session to download the file.

Private Chat. You can chat privately with a particular individual. Private Chat is text-only and is used for separate, private conversations between two individuals. A Private Chat session takes place in its own window, separate from the Conference Session window. Conversations taking place in a Private Chat window will be between you and the person whose ID appears in the title of the window only.

You may participate in as many Private Chat sessions simulaneously as you wish, but you can only participate in one Conference Session at a time. Conference Sessions can consist of many participants and they may include video, audio, whiteboard, and file sharing. Private Chat sessions are between two people (person-to-person) and they are text-only, with no video, audio, or whiteboard component.

In classic Instant Messaging terms, a Conference Session is similar to a Chat Room (except it includes multi-party/multi-point video) and Private Chat is similar to Instant Messaging.

We recommend that you start Conference Manager any time you are on-line and leave it running. This way, others can send you messages or invite you to a call or conference. To preserve screen space, you can minimize the Conference Manager windows to the taskbar.

Videoconferencing

Conference Manager allows multiple parties at different locations to participate in conference sessions that include video, using a basic desktop computer and inexpensive webcam-style video camera hardware.

Multipoint Video Any number of people may participate in a video session, with real-time moving full color video images. Each user's video image is displayed in a thumbnail view. Clicking the thumbnail produces a larger live-video picture.

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