 Welcome to Running Meetings with Microsoft Link. My name is Becky Wiegand, and I'm the Webinar Program Manager here at TechSoup, and I'm glad to be your host for today's event. Also joining us today as our key presenter is Doug Thomas. He's a Senior Content Developer for Office.com, and recently the lead of Office 15-Minute Webinars. So he's a pro at giving these kind of events for people and does it regularly with a weekly series with demos and Q&A on Office Help and How-To. He has created and appeared in more than 250 videos at Microsoft, including Office Casual, an award-winning personality-driven How-To series. So he really is a terrific expert for us to have joining us on the line. You'll also see on the back end Allie Bezdikian from TechSoup who will be there to help you with any questions and any technical issues throughout the webinar. Thank you so much, Doug, for being here today. We really appreciate having you as part of the program. Welcome. Doug Thomas Oh, happy to be here, Becky. Thank you very much. So I'll just say, talking about how to run things on Link while working on another piece of software that we're doing here, it's kind of like a hall of mirrors. So we won't be able to show everything, but let me go ahead and start sharing my screen here. And we can start talking, and we'll start with the basics since a good majority of folks have not used Link or have not even heard of it, or if they've heard of it, they haven't worked on it a lot. The way I explain Link to folks is it's basically people understand the IM premise of chatting with people, but it's kind of like IM on steroids. This page, by the way, if you wanted to go to it, is Office.com slash Link, just kind of the basic information that you have. So you can do many things with it. And one of the great things is even if you're starting with a conversation which several folks had done, you can add on to those things without going into another area or another tool or adding in some sort of a download. It's all encompassing Link. So I could chat with Molly like I'll do today who's going to help me out today. And at the same time with the same tools, I could run the webinars we used to do that here for up to 250 people that don't even have Link and do those for public webinars. So the whole gamut is there with that. In fact, when you have Link, it works with meetings. We'll show that. And also basically it becomes your telephone. In fact, I'm talking to you through the telephone. I'm not picking up the receiver. I'm just going through my phone, I'm sorry, through my computer which acts as my phone. All of that is there. And if you've listened to the news, you've heard a lot with Skype, Microsoft bought Skype a couple of years ago. There'll be more integration with Skype and Link as we go forward. But again, there's a lot of things you can do with it. I'm just going to go over some of the basics and then kind of show several different things for folks who have worked with Link some gotchas that you might want to see. But we'll have plenty of time for questions. So if there's areas you want to go down into, we can certainly do that. This here is about their top feature page. When you have a chance, this video up here in the upper right-hand corner is quite good in showing how it works with multiple devices. There is going to be Link apps for everything, different types of phones, iPhones, Android devices, all that stuff. We're going to stick with the PC version today which comes with Office 365 for business and for nonprofits. So you can spend your time a lot on this page and see a lot of different areas. But again, we'll stick kind of with the PC version. Let me bring in kind of, this is my Link that I work with all day. And I've kind of, again, because this is my actual Link, it's not a fictitious account. I've kind of hidden some things and stuff like that. But this is how I deal with my day. And if I want to contact folks, I can do that. I'm not going to go through a lot here. We'll do more with meetings and things like that since that's what we're talking about. But you can have all this information here. And one of the things that comes with Link is what we call presence. So you can see here, there's four folks down here who have some sort of light by them, whatever. If I want to talk to Chris, he's available. Dave looks like he's busy right now. And Justin and Molly are in a call because they're actually on this call right now. And of course, I'm in a call too. So you can see where people are if they're at their computer. If you can talk to them, there's different variants. In fact, as soon as I start presenting via Link, I go to a do not disturb presence so people can't disturb me while I'm actually presenting. Again, this is kind of weird because I'm presenting inside the hall of mirrors as we so to speak. But if I wanted to contact someone, I just simply click on their name. I'm going to work with Molly here who's helping us out today. And again, I could just start an IM chat here. And again, this presence that we see here is the same that we'll see for meetings and everything else. You can do everything from this screen pretty much that I'm going to show you. And we'll just go through some of the icons and things like that. And so I could call Molly if I want again. I won't do that because I'm working with you. We're not going to get much into video here though there I am. I'm a big fan of using video in conferencing. That's why you can do it, especially you can use it with HD cameras. But we won't talk a lot about that today. And the nice thing is if you notice on the screen that's actually the video preview. So with Molly I'm not talking on video yet. I can just preview to make sure I look good before I hit the button. You all look good. You all should be using video if you haven't. But there's other ways we can do it here. Molly, if you can get to this and go ahead and respond, I'm just going to show people how you can actually see when Molly is typing, let alone, I don't know how it does that. But it actually reads that Molly is typing even before I see the message. So I know that I'm engaged with Molly and can get things done. And again, Molly could be the other side of the building or across the world or another part of campus. It's like all Internet messaging. It works very well here. And this conversation will actually be saved in Outlook. It's called conversation history. So if you have, again this might turn into an impromptu call, but we might make a medium and make some major decisions in that, and that can all be captured. Let's show you some other options here you can do. I will say that again, you can use Link for everyone, even inside or outside your domain. Again, the Skype integration will help with that. It works best for internal, but you can use it for external. And you can get up to 250 people in a call. That's just out of the box. So you can get a lot of folks in there. Things I can do here in Link include, I can share, if I just mouse over this icon here, these are all the things I can share, including my monitor, which I'll show you in just a minute, programs, if you just want to show, let's say, I just want to show Excel and not worry about what else is on my computer at that time, whiteboards, polls, Q&A. You can do all of that with there. And there's also integration with OneNote if you want to take notes. And that's two options. Do I want to share the notes with everyone else in the call? Do I automatically get a link? Or I'm just taking notes for myself. And then the other thing here is dealing with people. So if we were starting this conversation, we realized, ooh, I need to get somebody else in. I can go ahead and invite more people here. And I can just type in either their name or their email. And I'll just invite Justin in here. And then he can join the meeting also. And you can see the pictures up here at the top. If we were running video, the video would be up here, not their pictures. And we could start an audio call, though I can't do that because again, I'm doing the audio call for the meeting here. But a lot of times we would just go ahead and do this with audio and messaging at the same time. But at the same time, you get a lot done via IM if you're doing something else. So as you can see, I could be on a call with somebody and still get some work done with Justin and Molly if I'm just listening to a conference call and not disturbing anything. So that's one of the nice things of Link. Not that you would do some fun conversations while you're trying to work, but you know what I mean. You can do both things. I'm just not going to engage the audio here today just because of this presentation that we're working on. So let's see here. Other things we can do. So I can manage content here. First of all, let me share my monitor. Now I'm at my office and yes, I'm sorry, but I do have three monitors here. But let me just go ahead and share the primary monitor. And if there's a problem, Becky, if you can just let me know. Everything should be working here. Again, it's kind of a house of mirrors. I'm presenting now two things here with both the TechSoup audience and then with Molly and Justin here. But basically, as you can see, it's going to show off my monitor. And if you can see, maybe you can't. There's kind of a, at the very top here, I can give control to folks so they can actually take over or I can show things. So let's say I wanted to bring in a document here. So let me just bring in, let me open up a folder here and I will open up an Excel document or something like that. And we could share this. It's a little big. Let me shrink that down here a little bit. So basically, if I want to talk numbers now, I could share this screen and this with Justin and Molly at the same time. Now I can also do this. I can give control. Now you can request permissions or I can give permission to Molly to say, she now has control. So Molly, if this works for you, go ahead and can you move the mouse and all that? Again, this might be this House of Mirrors effect where we can't do that. Yeah, there you go. So now she's clicking on things. Go ahead and click the tab at the bottom here. I'm not doing, no, not that tab. The tab in the Excel spreadsheet. See, the other thing is they could suddenly ruin everything here. Go up to the tab that says Financial Summary in that, or just yeah, or a color or cell or something like that I guess would work fine. So right now I'm talking to you. I'm doing the call and Molly is actually running this computer. So she can monkey y'all as she wants. The nice thing is this is how our tech folks work with us on our computer. So if I have a tech problem and I can still call in to the tech center and my computer is working that way, they can take control of the computer and go into the control panels and all the areas that they need to go to figure out what's wrong with my computer. So that's kind of the control that we have and you can have permissions of who can accept and who cannot give control. That's fine. So what I'm going to do now is, let's see, now I'm going to take this over. I'm going to go to the top here and I'm going to take back control. So you can add documents to link. In fact, let's go back to that screen. I'm going to shut down this Excel. And Molly, go ahead and add a document here to our conversation here. This is one of those things that I think I was working on link a couple of years before I even realized you could do this, that folks can add documents to the screen. So if Molly wanted to show me a document, there's two things. I could give her a present. I could give her control and she could take over the call and she could display her computer or you can add documents to the conversation. And that doesn't work. I know Justin was able to do that earlier, so we might be able to show it that way. I'm going to come back to that, but we'll show you that feature as you can add documents. So again, this is just the chat that started. Yes? Sorry, we had one question that came in that kind of referred to the chat. So Paul asked, so will Justin see the conversation from before he was added to the conversation? So since we're still looking at the same conversations right here, would he be able to see the history or would it only start from when he was added? Justin would only see the information once he started it. So we'd have to catch him up. Just like if he walked into a real meeting, we'd have to do the, hey, here's what you missed Justin, why were you late kind of thing? So yeah, no, you don't go back and see that information there. So let's see here. Now I didn't get notification, but I see that down here there was an attachment. Interesting. Okay, so documents can pop up. In fact, let me just go and you can add documents to the conversation. Let's start this a little bit over. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to, let me move this off-screen and this off-screen too. And let's open up Outlook and show you how you would start a meeting here. So I'm in my calendar view. And what I'm going to do is go up here. And when Link is in, integrated into Outlook, you get this new button up here. So I can start an appointment or a meeting here, but there's a thing called a Link Meeting. So I can go ahead and start a meeting this way. And basically it's populated down here in the message area with information for the meeting. There is a phone number in case people are not on a computer, if they just want to call in and listen, they can certainly do that. But most folks would just click on this link that has a URL as you can see there. And then I could send this to whoever I wanted to, get the information sent, all of that works just fine. Now up here in the area with the Link Meeting, there's Meeting Options. And let's click on those. All of these things you can change once you're in the meeting, but you can set them up in advance. And there's a couple things you probably want to do here. Let's just go down these few things here. You can do a new meeting space or have a dedicated meeting space. Dedicated meeting is really good for if you have weekly meetings inside that's just internal because that way any document you store will just stay there. It's the same URL each week, so it's a little more of a keeps things together. I usually do this new meeting space up here. You can control the permissions each time again. All of these permissions you can change once you're in the meeting. But if you want to set things up, for example, if you want to put people, if you know you're externally going to have some people and you're doing sensitive information, you can only put in people who from my company can get in. Everyone else will go into the lobby and I'll have to bring them in. You can announce the presence. That seems so 90s though. You can talk about who's going to be the presenter. So normally what we set up here is anyone that's in the organization can present right away. I can elevate people or make people a participant, not a presenter at any time. But these are options you can do. Here's a big one though, mute all attendees. We've all been in any conference call where everyone has an open mic. Even if it's more than five people, suddenly you hear, the mic picks up everything, talking, typing, things falling over, conversations, all of that. If you're going to have a large meeting, you can just mute all attendees from the start and then later you can unmute them if you need to. So that's one thing that I check if I'm going to more than a few people. And you can do those permissions here for each meeting if you want to. So that's how you would set up a meeting. Let's do this. Let me close this and go into a meeting here that I've already set up in advance. So once this meeting pops up, it's going to look the same for Molly and Justin who I invited as it does to me. And all we do to join this meeting, and again we'll cross our fingers here with this Hall of Mirrors. This should open up just fine. I'm going to click on Join Link Me. Again, information is down here in case I'm calling in if I'm on the road or whatever and don't have it. Though I must say there are link apps for your phone so I actually have used link with video on a phone when I'm not at the office. So that can happen. So you can do multiple conversations at the same time and go back and forth. You just have to hit the Resume Call button. Yes, you do get to see their pictures. I can show you how you make those smaller or not seen. But the nice thing about Molly and Justin, even my picture, we actually have clear pictures here. So if you have, if in your link photos or in your structure of your company, if you've put a goofy picture there, one, I would put pictures of what you actually look like. So if I see you in the hall, I know it's you. But it's good to have a good picture here. So people know who you are because sometimes with link you just see this. Now, we'll show you how you can get that different. But that's what pops up. So again, Justin and Molly and I are all seeing the same screen here. It's just what we saw before. I have the presenters up here. We have our IM Chat. I can present materials here if I want to. I can share screens if I want to. We can go into a whiteboard or a poll. There's options here I can work on with the participants. Do I want to mute the audience? Yes. Do I want to hide the names? If you can see our names, if I hit that, the names disappear. So if you're working outside, you don't want the names to appear. You could do that too. There's several other options. The trick with link is you mouse over the icons. And then you can see other options. And there's lots of menus. As you can see here, you can change between your setup that you have. So I could easily click this over if I didn't have my headset on to the PC mic or even the phone which is connected via link into my computer. So you can change your options quickly if you need to because sometimes I take these calls with just the regular mic on my computer. Sometimes I put on the headset. But if you're doing a webinar, you always want the best microphone possible. So let's see. Some other things that we can get into. We've talked about sharing screens. We've talked about putting documents in. You can load documents here. So let's actually go into here a little bit. So all the things I can share. I can share a monitor. I could just share a program. Now if you have a single screen to do some sort of limitation might be good. If you click on program here, you can just limit to whatever you want to talk about. Let's say I just want to show Excel. So if I pop into email, if I pop into link, if I go on the web and start looking at cat videos or whatever, you don't see that. You just see Excel. So you can control that. But believe it or not, the best fidelity, the best, you know, that you're not gumming up the computer with lots of different things is to show the monitor, believe it or not, is to just go ahead and share the monitor and that will do the best in making sure that everyone sees everything at once. Because there is some delay on link. There is some, you know, some days are going to be better than others. It depends upon your connection and things like that. Let's see here. So the other thing that I do a lot is if I'm going to present a meeting and I'm going to even show a deck or whatever, what I do load up is a PowerPoint and I've done this in advance down here. I've loaded this PowerPoint slide. So let me turn that on and we'll present this slide. Oops, I don't know why the icon suddenly appeared and that's just one slide. And so the people that see the link meeting just see this slide right now and I can do stuff behind the scenes before the meeting starts. And what I might do is if I'm going to present a whole deck, I will keep this slide on. I can check the deck. I can make last minute updates to the deck and then when I'm ready to run the deck or run my screen, I can do that. But that's kind of a practice that I use sometimes is just loading up that first slide in the pre-show so I can do things behind the scenes, so to speak. Some other things that you can work on here. In fact, let's go ahead and let's do some of the fun things. You can do things with whiteboards and poles. Again, I could have done this in the call when I was just calling Molly. Before that, how do I get rid of those pictures, Doug? I don't like seeing my face everywhere. Down here, again, another icon is called Pick a Layout and you just click on that and you get different views you can speak. So I want to do the content view and now those pictures are away and people are just viewing the content. So that's one way to get those pictures out of the way. I can also click on these icons if I don't want to show this whole list here. If I just click on that icon, it goes away. If I click on this icon, the people go away and now we're just presenting the slide. So on these icons, mousing over them or clicking on them, you'll find different menus and I've just done it through exploring basically. You can read all about it that you want, but to click on these things and just kind of work on them yourselves is I always find out the best way to work on that. So again, different views, different things. Let's see, what time we got here? Okay, we're half an hour in. Just trying to think of, again, I can definitely get into more things. Let's show something off like a pole though. You can start a new pole. I've actually pre-made a pole. So I'll put it up here. And the same kind of thing you just saw for the TechSoup, we asked a question here. We can go ahead and pull in these questions. And again, I get the same thing. I can open and close the pole. I can show the results to everyone. I can see the results are hidden. I see that I'm dealing with the right people in Justin and Molly that they prefer dark chocolate because I've heard there are these other things like milk chocolate. I've heard of that. But I'm sorry, I'm a dark chocolate. In fact, I'll vote for dark chocolate too. So it will be a pure three responses. And you could change your vote if you wanted to. Everyone just gets to vote once though. That's the thing with the pole. And you can see the lines change and all that. It's technically health food. Totally agree, Justin. See, they didn't even know I was going to go there. And again, if I wanted to see these, so you can see Justin made a conversation that I did not see, but I get a pop-up box. If I wanted to go back and see that conversation again, I just click on it and then it appears right there, the whole conversation that we've had. Click it again and it goes away. So clicking and mousing on icons is really a big way to work on these things. And again, I can show the results to everyone. So now Justin and Molly would see the results. You can also work with whiteboards. Let's do this here. If I go into the whiteboard here, and again, you can actually add things. In fact, I'm going to try this really quick. I'm going to add a picture here. And then so anyone can use this whiteboard. You can make little scrolls. You can do check marks here. This is actually the setup when we would do our office 15-minute webinars. This is Chris Downs, who was my partner, who kind of ran the link meetings while we did the demo. Now we do fancier stuff with cameras and things like that. But this was kind of a setup that we did. Happy to go over and talk to you about how we did webinars. You can see those multiple cameras and microphones and things like that. But again, they're augmenting this screen here with, as you can see, you can use stamps and arrows. You can draw lines. You could do this and share items with everything you want to. You can make little funny shapes if you wanted to. There's Chris's new haircut. Oops, the picture disappeared. I guess someone maybe deleted it. Because Molly and Justin are presenters, that could have happened. But let's say someone's doing something they shouldn't be doing. I'm going to go back over here to the list. Oh, thank you for bringing the picture back. So what I can do here is I have the power to right-click on names and I can remove people. So if I knew Justin was being a bad, bad person or writing things I didn't want him to write, I could remove him or just simply make him an attendee. So now he has different permissions. I could give him permissions to present, but if he was doing certain things I'd have to give those permissions to go ahead and use the whiteboard or things like that. So you can control during the meeting what's going on with that information. Just the last couple things that we'll talk about and then I'll be happy to open up the questions and go wherever you'd like me to on this. So if you send someone a link meeting and they don't have a link and they click on that link message, let me show you that again. So I sent this to somebody. They don't have a link and they click on Join the Link Meeting. What happens to them is they get, it just goes to a simple URL and they get this screen here, which is the link web app. And they can type in and join this meeting. So let's say it's Sally. Again, this has nothing to do with preregistering or who they are. I could type in any name here I want to. And they could sign in with their Office 365 account or just they don't have to. And they can join the meeting here. Now we're doing mirror, within, mirror, within, mirror. So Sally now is basically in the virtual lobby. Let me go back to my meeting here. Which ones are meeting here? Here it is. Let me go back to, I'm going to present that slide again. So let me go back and do the welcome slide. I get a notification down here that one person is waiting in the lobby and there is Sally right there. Because Sally was not a presenter. She's in the lobby. I can deny access or go ahead and admit access. And so I'll do that. So now Molly is, I'm sorry, Sally is joined, Sally and Molly. Sally is here, is joined into the conference. And if I go to Sally's screen now, this is what she sees. There you go. She sees the faces at the top and she'll see whatever I'm presenting happens to be here that I'm just presenting the slide. Her mic is muted you can see down here. You can get details and she can ask permission for stuff but I can totally deny it or I can, again, with those presets I could totally make it that she's just witnessed. She just witnesses what's going on here. She could contact us directly but I could make it that, again, that you don't do that. She could go to what just is the presentation view and just see the slides. So I do a lot of demos as you can tell on link so to make the screen as big as possible. And it's still, this looks and feels like link even though I'm just in a browser. Any updated browser should work. Firefox, Safari, Chrome. I'm on Internet Explorer here. One last note that I'll make about anything that deals with link and that's this little key button down here called Mute. Let me actually get Sally off here and come back to my screen. Now this is a little different because, again, we're in the hall of mirrors so to speak but to put your, to make sure you know how to get to this Mute button is critical because you want to be able to mute right away. Some microphones have that button. In fact, let me do this if I can. Let me get rid of the invite here. I don't get the video now. Let's see if I do it this way. Maybe I can get the video. Hang on here. Let me show you what I've done in video. Yeah, so yeah, you're seeing that. So this is the little button that is connected to my headset. It's got a call button and a mute button here. I actually, for this call here, I actually button it right below camera so I can get to it very quickly. If you present, know thy mute button is one of the commandments. Because anytime you scrabble for it, anytime you're thinking, oh golly, where's the mute button and all that? For people who just start off, it's always the joke. But if you want to do a top presentation, do it well, you just got to know exactly where the mute button is. So just to remind you that Link is available in the Microsoft Office Professional 2013 donations through TechSoup. You can also get it as standalone product donations through the Microsoft program with TechSoup. So you can get Link server and Link client access license if you want to have it individually installed on machines in your office. And it's available as part of the Office 365 for nonprofits donations which are, I think there's four different levels available at this point. So we'll point you to all of those in those follow-up resources. And I'd like to just thank you Doug for taking the time. We really appreciate you doing this introduction to what Link is and how you can create and run meetings using this really cool tool. Thanks to Molly and Justin for helping on the back end with the demo. And thank you to Allie for helping with managing questions. Lastly, thank you to our webinar sponsor today, ReadyTalk for providing the use of the ReadyTalk 500 platform that's also available in our catalog at techsoup.org slash readytalk.