Do I send the conference phone number ahead of time?

... I'll have to find out and one of us get back to you! It's an easy question but the answer seems to have a few ifs-and-buts in it. We're talking it through now.

Meanwhile, it's worth me checking my understanding of what you want to do. I think you want to be able to send out an invite, perhaps by email, to a group of people which basically says 'click here to see the show, dial here to join the voice conference, and type in this pin'

is that it? So you need to know ahead of time the facts around PIN codes and dial-in numbers?

speak soon - Al

Hello again.

I reckon from your previous questions that you're probably after using Web Share to present something to a wide audience.

To schedule a meeting like this:

1. Find out the PIN to send everyone by clicking 'Web Share' then using the PIN code given at the top of the screen. It will be the same for you always in Web Share.

2. Let everyone else know that PIN code, the URL to use in their browser and the date and time of your meeting - by email, facebook, phone or any other way convenient to you.

To make it easier, you'll find a 'copy' button/link near where your pin code is displayed. This will put the URL and the PIN code into your system clipboard, ready to 'paste' into emails and things.

After our discussions, it turns out that unless you do some tricky things, you get allocated your own PIN which belongs to you. Web Shares and Conversations you start will have your PIN in them. If you add people into thsoe things, the PIN stays the same.

We did that deliberately (and with some effort, it seems!) so that they can join the audio conference without everyone having to stop the call and dial in again. Obviously, that would be ridiculously bad, and so the system of PIN codes works the way it does to make audio conferencing work sensibly.

hope that helps -
Al. You know where I am if it doesn't cover everything!

Hi, So long as you start the meeting and use your PIN number then everyone should be on the same call. If you use the single chat windows that people sent to you, this will be a different PIN number as they have started the chat not you.

So you can understand how it works. All chats, screen shares etc stared by you, where you get a chat window, will have your PIN number at the top.

The other people who have sent a message back to you must not have put their chat message in the window and mut have started a new chat message just to you. This means it will have their PIN number at the top of the window.

If you are hosting, stick to the window you started with.

Please add me in using neil.kay-jones@yuuguu.com and i will show you how to use it. It seems you have got the basic idea but it is just a case of knowing what and where to look in the application. Once you know, it will be very easy to do this.

Regards,

Neil

Oh Dear.

Sorry to hear about your troubles. It sounds like you did do the right thing in setting up the meeting, but that things started to go wrong after that and some of the things you all tried to resolve the problems may have caused secondary problems.

I'll tell you what I can, from my understanding of what you've said above.

You were setting up a group of yourself and five other registered Yuuguu users. They appeared as Contacts in your contacts list. You wanted to show them your screen and talk to them using our audio/telephone conference service.

That *should have been* easy.

You did the right thing to start that. You select the five contacts in the Contact list, and click the 'Show' button. Normally, the next thing that happens is that five computers will get a 'rpitcairn wants to share their screen: accept/decline' offer. That probably did in fact happen from what you say.

That offer disappears after about fifteen seconds, and gets moved to the top of the chat history. The idea is to declutter your screen, but first time users are not likely to understand that. I suggest that some of your group couldn't find the 'Accept' button for your screen share. If you think that's a likely problem let us know and we'll make a note of that, see if it can be simplified.

The phone numbers and PIN codes were probably right. If you got those by clicking 'Web Share' in advance of the meeting, you should have seen the same PIN code at the top of you five-way group screen share control screen. The numbers at the top of the control screen are the ones actually in use for that share. I think we talked before about this; Yuuguu currently is optimised for ad-hoc spur of the moment meetings where you shift click the names, start the group chat then ask them to dial the number/pin at the top of their chat window. It's less good at pre-planned meetings like this one.

The parts about clicking copy at the top of individual one to one requests for help is particularly unfortunate, and thank you so much for that detailed feedback. We can't fix this. Whilst that was unintended behaviour for you, we support having several conversations at once, each of which could have a separate phone conference going on. The result of that is what you see - we maintain separate PIN codes for each distinct group of people. So "A, B, C and D" is a different meeting to "D and A".

What is strange to me about that is that your contacts chose (or stumbled on by mistake) to send you a one-to-one message, rather than respond to the conversation window. I would expect them to have had a conversation window open in front of them, and for them to ask questions to the whole group in that. Do you know if that was the case? or were there problems in getting to this group-conversation window? There might be something we've not made easy enough in that area.

Dialling in different PIN codes to the conference service will, alas - or hurray -, result in different conversations, as that is how people are hooked up - everyone on the same PIN code gets joined together. We think that we ought to improve how we present the PIN code information, particularly for pre-planned meetings. It's on our list. I didnt think our provider had music though; I thought it was just silence...

Finally the part about 2 shares and four shares; it may well have been true, I cant tell. A possible explanation is that 2 of your group had stumbled upon sharing a screen between themselves. As any Yuuguu user can have only one screen share going at a time, you would not have been able to add them into your screen share in that case. If this was the case, I can see why that, again, is something undesirable for you but we can;t fix, because the ability to have - how can I word this? - multiple screen shares going on within your contacts list is important. Example: All my company is on Yuuguu; the finance group are in a conference/screen share, the dev team are in a separate conference/share. A finance person could not add in a dev team person to the finance share ubtil the dev team person left the dev team share.

Also, the dial up user. If that is someone using dial up 28k or 56k internet, screen share only works usably on broadband. Also, although I dont think you meant this, if you only have one voice line, and that voice line is tied up with an internet modem, you would not have any voice line available to access the audio conference. You would have to use a mobile, or different landline in that case. Dont know if thats what you meant, but its one way of reading it.

Many thanks for your time in this feedback though. We will consider it as we revise our product.

Sorry we've not been as straightforward as we'd like.

Al - developer.

One other tip, just occurred to me. From what you say, you may have tried to launch the audio tekephone conference before the yuuguu session. You can do this, but I would recommend always starting the group chat first, and sending a simple chat message 'Hi; welcome to the meeting. Please dial in to the conference now' type thing.

That probably gives a focus to the users about which screen and group they should be looking at, and they would tend to reply toi that first message rather than start their own.