Here are a couple of tips and tricks to make your Novell Conferencing experience more successful.

By default Conferencing will open a web page to http://www.novell.com/conferencing when your guests log in. This can slow down their experience.

To remove the default URL:

1. On your Conferencing room page, click on "Preferences"=>"Personalization"

• In the section labeled "Collaboration space web page" click the "Clear"link, then click "Save

Remove the meeting assistant (it is rarely used during Conferencing, and personally, very annoying)

1. On your conferencing page, click on "Preferences" => "Features"

• Under the "Advanced" label, set the Meeting assistant to "Off", then click "Save"

If the presenter eliminates the chat window, it expands the participant's view, and improves their experience. If you don't need it, get rid of it.

1. After starting a meeting the window has 3 main sections. On the right side is a section labeled "Public Chat"

• If the presenter clicks the heading on this section the "Public Chat" disappears, and the shared section or segment of the window becomes larger

• If you want to enable chat, simply click the arrow next to Show Chat to bring it back.

Loading a presentation (.ppt or a .pdf presentation) will provide a better experience than simply sharing the desktop. Viewing a presentation rather than a full desktop share is faster and clearer for the conference participants.

When showing a presentation, instead of clicking the "Next" button in the presentation use the left and right arrow keys to move from slide to slide. Conferencing deals with this more reliably.

After loading the presentation, before the meeting, move sequentially through all the slides, then back to the start. This will preload the slides in the cache making everything faster.

Use the instant conference option to start a meeting instead of scheduling it. About 90% of the meetings are instant conferences. The instant conference option is quick and simple and does not require any setup. Unless you need to set up meeting specific options that are different from your defaults (IE a different call-in number), set a pass code to secure your meeting, or deal with registrations for that event, scheduling a meeting is simply not necessary.

Set your your default meeting length to a "safe" length. Whether you schedule a meeting or use an instant meeting, Conferencing will stop the meeting after the time specified in your preferences.   If your preferences are set to 1 hour, because that's how long you expect your meeting to be, but you then long in 20 minutes early to preload your presentation and to get set up, the clock starts then and Conferencing will end the meeting 20 minutes early. It will display a warning but if you do not see it or have a chance to extend the meeting in time, it terminate the Conference. The best thing to do is to set the default time to the longest that your meeting will possibly be plus some time for setup plus some time in case it runs over.

To set your meeting length:

1. On your Conferencing room page, click on "Preferences"=>"Features"

• Set the "Meeting Length" to the time you feel is reasonable.