Manage and Host Scheduled Meetings

Scheduling Hints and Tips

• When scheduling a meeting you can move the mouse over form headings (such as Meeting Title, Meeting Summary, etc) to display context sensitive help about the setting.
• All scheduled meetings support their own invitations lists and an invitation process that sends e-mail invitations.  Invitations e-mails may be sent in English, French, German, Spanish, etc.  Invitations contain information about the meeting, reminders, a meeting preparation link and a link to join the meeting.
• When inviting people to your meeting, you can select a contact group which adds all contacts within the group to your meeting's invitation list.  With just a few keystrokes, you can invite hundreds of people to your meeting.  And since our contact groups have the ability to importing contact lists from Outlook, Gmail, Hotmail and custom files, sending meeting invitations has never been easier.
• Meeting invitations detail the scheduled date/time of the meeting in 4 major time zones (GMT 0, Pacific Time, Central Time and Eastern Time).
• When an invitation is received, the invitee can use the reminder options provided in the e-mail to import an Outlook or Lotus notes reminder, schedule a cell phone SMS reminder or request an additional e-mail reminder.  These features help ensure your participants will join your meeting at the designated time.
• All meetings support calendar based scheduling.  Just click in the date/time field to display the calendar.  Meeting times are always scheduled as per your local date/time.
• All meetings may be VoIP based and/or be used with any 3rd party teleconferencing service.  When teleconferencing is used, you must define call-in numbers and an optional meeting PIN #.  When people join your meeting, a pop-up displays the phone numbers and requests the participant to dial-in.  By providing the teleconferencing information AFTER people have joined your meeting, conferencing privacy is ensured.
• All meetings may be assigned a meeting picture.  This option helps improve how your listing looks and attract attention.  Submitted pictures are reviewed by our approval team before they will appear on the website.
• Scheduled meetings are either active or inactive.  Inactive meetings are not displayed on the website until they are in progress.  Active meetings appear on the Join Meetings page 2 hours before they are scheduled to commence enabling participants to click on a link and wait for the host to start the meeting.
• Active public meetings will also appear on the Upcoming Public Events page (until the scheduled commencement date has expired).  This allows people to browse your meeting listing, request reminders, browse the meeting agenda or enroll (if it is enrollable).
• Unlisted meetings are never displayed on the website and therefore cannot be joined using the web-site.  There is no reason to post a picture to an unlisted meetings since no one will ever see it.  Participants join using an e-mail invitation, a web page link or by entering a Meeting ID on the join meetings page.
• Private meetings are assigned a meeting password that is required to join the meeting.  When you invite a person to a private meeting, their e-mail invitation will inform them of the meeting password.
• Public meetings are not password protected, anyone can join a public meeting.  Inactive public meetings do not appear on the website until they have started.  If you wish people to browse your public meeting listing, ensure the meeting is set to be active.  Since active Public meetings appear on the Upcoming Public Events page, search engines will index the content enabling people to search and find your meeting listing.  Since the WebTrain must comply with policies set by search engines, before setting a public meeting to be active, please ensure your meeting content is professional.  We suggest that BEFORE setting the meeting to be active, you should spell check the content.
• Enrollable meetings are public meetings which require enrollment.  Enrollable meetings support manual and automated enrollment management.  For automated enrollment, the meeting must be set to be active so it can be viewed on the web-site.  Otherwise people cannot enroll in your meeting.  Enrollable meetings can be free or fee based.  For fee based enrollable meetings, the payment process can be manual (you collect funds using your usual method) or automated.  If you wish to use the automated payment system a PayPal vendor account will be required.  PayPal vendor accounts are free and take just a few minutes to setup and integrate with WebTrain.  9 different selling currencies are supported and funds can be directly deposited into your bank account.
• When a person completes a free or fee based automated enrollment, they are automatically e-mailed an enrollment confirmation which discloses their unique Enrollment ID which they must use to join the meeting.  The manual enrollment process also allows you to send confirmations containing the same content.  Please note meeting presenters do not need to be enrolled as they can join the meeting using a Presenter ID (instead of an Enrollment ID).  E-mail invitations and meeting commencement notices will disclose the recipient's Enrollment ID (if they are enrolled) or the Presenter ID (if they not enrolled).
• Enrollable meetings support invitations AND enrollment management.  This allows you to market your meeting by inviting people to enroll in your meeting.  Of course, enrollment invitations provide a link to your scheduled meeting which provides the enrollment.
• Enrollable meetings support an optional message board.  When a message board is assigned to an enrollable meeting, enrollment confirmation e-mails inform the enrollee that their enrollment includes access to the message board.  They can then use their Enrollment ID to immediately access the message board, view message threads, download videos or files, access homework assignments or post messages with attachments.  Note that all content posted to a message board is automatically server side virus scanned, infected files are automatically deleted.
• Enrollable meetings may be assigned a different person to host the meeting (a meeting instructor).   For such meetings, your account does not need to be shared as the system will allow the instructor to host the meeting.  Instructors can be prevented from altering enrollments.  When the instructor management option is disabled, although the instructor cannot change the meeting definition or add/remove enrollments, they can change the date/time of the next meeting session, host the meeting and blast e-mail notifications to people that are enrolled in the meeting.
• Enrollable meetings support an agenda definition which may contain meeting agenda, course pre-requisites, host or instructor biography, pictures, links, class session dates and times, etc.  Enrollment limits may also be set, when the enrollment limit has been reached, further enrollments are prevented.  Enrollments can also be temporarily toggled off anytime.
• When people enroll in a meeting, the meeting enrollment count is updated and the meeting host (and optional instructor) are automatically notified of the new registration via e-mail.
• Webinar meetings are a variant of a public or private meeting.  Webinar meetings hide meeting participants from each other enabling you to invite competitors to the same meeting.  Participants do not know how many people are attending the meeting.  Webinar meetings are presentation oriented (view only mode is enabled by default).  When view only mode is enabled, participants are restricted from interaction until they are pushed to the Chat Board by a presenter for a Question and Answer (Q&A) session.
• A Syndicated marketing feature can be used with public meetings.  This option helps expose and market your public meeting to tens of millions on people.  Public meetings set with this option are indexed on Google, Yahoo, Live and Teoma.  RSS Feeds are automatically generated and RSS syndication services (such as Feedburner, Syndic8, Technorati, Bloglines, Newsgator, Moreover) are notification pinged so they immediately retrieve and syndicate your meeting listing.  For webinar sales ticklers or news announcements, this option helps increase attendance.
• Once underway, all meetings (except unlisted meetings) appear on the join meetings page.
• When you have scheduled a meeting, the schedule and host meetings page will display a preview of all your scheduled meetings and provide options which allow you to host the meeting, invite people to the meeting, management enrollments, change the date and time of the meeting, blast e-mails, delete the meeting, etc.