“Can you hear it? No? Oh well… it would have been very entertaining.”
Presentations are performances and the more senses a performance engages with the more immersive the experience becomes. A standard presentation will play with your intellect, your hearing and your vision but if you can add an element of motion and good quality music you will make it so much more engaging. You need to do this flawlessly though because trying and failing is much worse then knowingly avoiding it.
There are two ways for presenting in Teams: you can either upload your presentation or you can share your screen. (I will stick to the built-in options here but if you’re interested, there are some great guides on how you can use mixing software – like OBS Studio – or hardware to do more).
When you upload a presentation, you can use PowerPoint Online inside the Teams meeting. Your attendees will see the slides rendered from the service while you can control your slides in the meeting window. If you choose this, then make sure that attendees are not presenters and you have disabled private viewing of your slides (unless you want that to happen – it has its upsides too). If you use this method to share videos, then you will need to embed them into the PowerPoint presentation. Make sure that the video file is not too large and also test how the playback behaves for various participants inside and outside your tenant.
The other way, which admittedly gives you more control over what is shared is sharing your screen. When sharing your screen, the important thing is not to forget to share your system audio. This is a small switch at the top of the sharing tray that you can turn on when selecting what to share. If you forget, you can also toggle it at the top of your shared screen on the little command tray that will pull down from the top if you hover there.
If you share your system audio or you play a video from your machine you want to be sure that you have enough bandwidth to push that out at a good rate. Just remember that during the video your uplink will try to carry your screen video at a good frame rate, your own video feed (your face) and both your system audio and your voice. If there is any concern about the capacity, your should first mute yourself and maybe turn off your video feed and if that is not enough, then you want to think about alternative solutions too (see below).
Planning and testing your setup: as the remote experience is not only dependent on your connection but also individual people’s connections, you definitely want to plan ahead of the time:
- You want to think about what bandwidth you need from your computer to the Teams service as shown above.
- Think about how many attendees you will have and how far they may be from you and the service. If you’re presenting to a worldwide audience where some of the attendees may be on high-latency connections then you want to think twice about including real-time elements.
- If possible, think of some of the scenarios that you will encounter and organise a prep call where you can test the results with some friendly end-users so you can understand the real results ahead of your presentation. It is good to turn on recording for these sessions as that will show you what reaches the Teams service and with that you will be able to distinguish between upstream and downstream issues.
What happens if the testing shows that the experience will not be good? You will have to make a decision. This is highly subjective and there are more than one good answers. My personal experience is that delivering a smooth presentation that flows well has a much better impact even if it is low-tech than one that sets the bar high but struggles to deliver due to technology or bandwidth.
If you need to make alternative arrangements for sharing video you can either publish to an online service or you can also use OneDrive to share with individual recipients. With OneDrive you can also ensure that people need to enter a password to access the file. It is not as elegant as playing it in the meeting but if it is important to share the video it may still be better than struggling with it inside the meeting.
These are some of the tips I have for sharing media inside a meeting. While the article was mostly concerned about what can go wrong and how to work around it, in most cases sharing from your screen will work great and all you need to make sure is you don’t forget to share your system audio. Good luck presenting and let me know in the comments what other tips you have for sharing media effectively during a presentation.
LevInProgress 