Section 26.4. Windows Meeting Space: Home Premium Business Premium Ultimate


26.4. Windows Meeting Space: Home Premium ¢ Business ¢ Premium ¢ Ultimate

Once you've got a nice home or office network humming along, files aren't the only things you can share. You can also share time and ideas.

That's the idea behind Windows Meeting Space, a new program for collaborating with up to 10 other people, over your office network or even across the Internet. It's a worthy successor to programs like NetMeeting.


Note: All participants must have Windows Vista. If you're using the Home Basic edition, you can join other people's meetings in Meeting Space, but you can't host or start one. That'll teach you to be a cheapskate.

26.4.1. Calling a Meeting to Order

The first time you choose Start All Programs Windows Meeting Space, you go through a little setup wizard. Along the way, you need to:

  • Click "Yes, continue setting up Windows Meeting Space."

  • Authenticate yourself (page 191).

  • Set up People Near Me, a feature that autodetects other computers nearby. Here, you'll type in the name by which you wish to be known in the Meeting Space world.

At last you arrive at the shaded blue happy world of Windows Meeting Space. If your intent is to join a meeting in progress, double-click its name, as shown in Figure 26-9 at bottom.

Figure 26-9. Top: As Meeting Space starts up, you're asked if you want to sign into the Meeting Space world every time your PC starts up .
Bottom: Hey, there are meetings going on! Two, in fact. Double-click a meeting in progress to join it .


If you want to begin the meeting, though, do the following:

  1. Click "Start a new meeting."

    You're asked to name the meeting and provide a long password for it. You certainly wouldn't want unauthorized strangers to find out what you're talking about!

  2. Make up a name and password for your meeting .

    Another note to the paranoid : if you click the Options link, you can designate this meeting as invisible, so that it won't show up in other people's Meeting Space lists, ready for clicking; they'll have to know the meeting's name.


    Tip: If, in the Options dialog box, you turn on "Create a private ad hoc wireless network," you can use Meeting Space without even having a network. You and a fellow wireless laptopper can connect through the air with each other, even in the absence of an existing office network.
  3. Press Enter (or click the green arrow button) .

    You've just entered the meeting, as made clear by the picture of a projector screen.

26.4.2. Inviting Participants

At this point, the lucky meeting members can join you in any of four ways:

  • Anyone in the vicinity who fires up Meeting Space sees your meeting listed. People can double-click its name to "enter the room" (after supplying the password).

  • You can invite someone electronically by clicking the "Invite people" link. A list of people who've been through the Meeting Space setup process appears; turn on the checkboxes of the people you want to meet in cyber-meeting space, and then click "Send invitations."


    Note: Recipients won't get your invite unless they're either (a) running Meeting Space; or (b) they've signed into People Near Me. They can do that by choosing Start Control Panel, clicking "Network and Internet," and then clicking the "Sign in or out of People Near Me link. If they also click "Change People Near Me settings," they'll find a checkbox called "Sign me in automatically when Windows starts," so they won't miss any more invitations in the future.
  • You can invite someone by email, which is just the ticket if you want to conduct a collaboration session across the Internet. To do that, after clicking "Invite people," click "Invite others." You'll see the "Send an invitation in e-mail" option. The recipient gets an email message with an attachmentone that, when double-clicked, asks for the password and sends the person into your meeting.

  • You can create an invitation file that you distribute in some other formon a flash drive or CD, for example. The recipient can double-click this file to join your meeting. (OK, this scenario is far- fetched , but you never know.)

    Use the "Invite others" option described above, but in the resulting dialog box, click "Create an invitation file."


    Tip: After a while, it dawns on you that there are now three remote-access programs in Vista: Remote Assistance (Chapter 5), Remote Desktop (Chapter 27), and Meeting Space, all fairly similar. Read up and decide.

26.4.3. Fun in Meetings

Once your meeting gets started, each participant shows up with an icon (Figure 26-10).

Figure 26-10. There's a lot going on in a Meeting Space meetingif you can get in, that is. Firewall problems, bandwidth problems, and the requirement to have Vista may get in your way. Heythere's always the phone .


Here's the kind of collaboration fun you can have:

  • Share your desktop . Other people in the meeting can actually see your PC screen image. They see what you're doing, in other words.

    When you click "Share a program or your desktop" (and then dismiss the warning box), the "Start a shared session" dialog box appears. Double-click the name of the program or window you want other people to see.


    Tip: Alternatively, you can drag a document icon from your desktop directly into the main Meeting Space window, whereupon it opens. Everyone else can see it, too.

    The screen may blink, things may get fritzy, but sure enough, other people now see your screen. In fact, they can even request control of your computerto point out an error in your work, for example. To do that, someone can click the next to "Casey is in control just above the shared window and, from the pop-up menu, choose Request Control. (Or you can choose Give Control from your menu bar.)

    If you grant control to someone, the keyboard and mouse are no longer yours to operate .


    Tip: If you don't like the way things are going when someone else is manipulating your screen, you can seize control back againjust hit +Esc.
  • Pass a note . Double-click a participant's icon to open a note window. Type your note and then hit Send. Your correspondent can reply to you, and you can continue chatting behind everyone else's backs as the meeting proceeds. (The window holds only one response at a time, so it's not really like a chat program.)

  • Distribute a handout . Click "Add a handout" to select a document that you want to pass to everyone else in the meeting. They'll be able to edit the copy one person at a time; the changes they make appear magically in everyone else's copies. (Your original remains untouched.)

26.4.4. Meeting Space Weirdness

Windows Meeting Space is ambitious, but also fairly fraught with technical obstacles. A firewallthe built-in Windows one or one you've addedcan stop Meeting Space in its tracks. The Meeting Space Help screens, in fact, offer pages and pages of troubleshooting tactics, some of which are best handled by a networking pro.

It's worth noting, too, that Meeting Space requires you to be on what Microsoft, in Vista, calls a private network; see the box on page 359 for details.

You may also notice that when somebody's sharing his desktop or a program window, weird black areas appear on your screen. That's because Meeting Space shows you only the parts of the presenter's screen that are actually occupied by the program he's sharing. All other areas appear black to youincluding areas where another program is covering up the shared program.

Handout sharing can get tricky, too. Whoever makes changes (and saves them) most recently "wins." If you and Riley both make changes at the same time, but you save the document and then Riley does, Riley's changes wipe our yours. (You've been warned .)

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION
FTP Sites and Other Online Disks

How do I bring an FTP server, or one of those Web-based backup drives , onto my PC?

The trick to bringing these servers online is the "Add a network place" linkbut you won't find it in the task pane of the Network window, as it did in Windows XP.

The trick is to right-click a blank spot in the Computer window. From the shortcut menu, choose "Add a Network Location."

When the wizard appears, click Next. Then, on the second screen, click "Choose a custom network location." Click Next.

Finally you arrive at the critical screen, where you can type in the address of the Web site, FTP site, or other network location that you want your new shortcut to open.

Into the first text box, you can type any of these network addresses:

The UNC code . As described earlier in this chapter, a UNC code pinpoints a particular shared folder on the network. For example, if you want to open the shared folder named FamilyBiz on the computer named Dad, enter \\dad\familybiz . Capitalization doesn't matter. Or, to open a specific file, you could enter something like \\dad\finances\budget.xls .

http://website/folder . To see what's in a folder called Customers on a company Web site called BigBiz.com, enter http://bigbiz.com/customers. (You can't just type in any old Web address. It has to be a Web site that's been specifically designed to serve as a "folder" containing files.)

ftp://ftp.website/folder . This is the address format for FTP sites. For example, if you want to use a file in a folder named Bids on a company site named WeBuyStuff.com, enter ftp://ftp.webuystuff.com/bids.

What happens when you click Next depends on the kind of address you specified. If it was an FTP site, you're offered the chance to specify your user name. (Access to every FTP site requires a user name and password. You won't be asked for the password until you actually try to open the newly created folder shortcut.)

Click Finish to complete the creation of your network shortcut, which now appears in the Network Location area in the Computer window. To save you a step, the wizard also offers to connect to and open the corresponding folder.

You can work with these remote folders exactly as though they were sitting on your own hard drive. The only difference is that because you're actually communicating with a hard drive via the Internet, the slower speed may make it feel as if your PC has been drugged.





Windows Vista. The Missing Manual
Windows Vista: The Missing Manual
ISBN: 0596528272
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 284
Authors: David Pogue

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