EarthLink Conference Manager

Contents

• Overview
• User interface quick guide
• 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

Suggested uses

Conference Manager and Presence

If you wish to chat and communicate with other people using Conference Manager, it is important that you leave the Conference Manager software running in the background whenever you are online. Conference Manager will show the on-line status of others and will allow you to find and connect with other people.

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.

The lists below offer some other ideas for using Conference Manager, starting with some general uses, followed by a few specific examples.

General Uses

• Meetings
  The most familiar application of videoconferencing is arranged meetings. When people work across large distances, the opportunity for face-to-face interaction is greatly reduced. Videoconferencing enables interactions that include visual information that would not occur otherwise. Conference Manager provides a communication medium that is somewhere between physical face-to-face and the telephone. It allows people to communicate over long distances and allows all parties to do so from their offices with access to their own resources, as the telephone does. Yet, the video signal provided by Conference Manager supports richer and more frequent interactions of shorter duration, more similar to face-to-face interactions, such as those that occur when workers are co-located.

• Persistent Video Sessions
  Video can have a positive impact on communications and remote collaboration. In particular, persistent video sessions (always-on video) offers significant value in approximating conditions of physical proximity for remote co-workers and in facilitating informal communications that improve group cohesiveness and effectiveness.

• Facilitating Communications
  Video can play a critical role in providing awareness and in establishing connections. Studies of workplace communication show that most interactions occur spontaneously for short periods of time. These unplanned interactions occur naturally when group members are co-located. Despite research from various disciplines showing the value of these informal interactions, evidence indicates that people in the workplace do not recognize their value. Workers tend to overuse formal arranged meetings and underutilize impromptu communication relative to their value. Providing availability information using video increases the chances of successfully initiating an unplanned connection with a remote coworker.

Specific Examples

• Distance Learning
  Opportunities for enhancing education with Conference Manager include remote-teacher applications, as well as classroom-to-classroom interaction. Conference Manager can be used across more than 2 sites, allowing virtual education "teams" to be created. It can be used in the K-12 education system, as well as in-house corporate training, government services coordination e.g. for emergency services, and many other education areas.

• Telecommuting
  Conference Manager can provide a natural and productivity-enhancing improvement to telecommuting, enabling more effective communication between employees who are at home and those who are in the office. Telecommuters can also use videoconferencing to interact with similarly equipped colleagues at other locations or even across organizations, ranging from meetings to remote presentations and even conference attendance.

• Remote Lectures or Presentations
  Use Conference Manager to present lectures, seminars, or presentations to several sites sismultaneousley. The whiteboard can be useful in such cases.

• Surveillance & Security
  Conference Manager can be used as a one-way monitoring technology. Such a surveillance solution would allow monitoring devices to be positioned anywhere there is a LAN connection and allow video from these sources to be monitored. Special remote-control cameras with pan-tilt-zoom capabilities, could be used, or cameras with features such as auto-tracking.

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