Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Folks – a kind suggestion to those of you using Lync to do broadcast presentations: 

• Please upload your PowerPoint into Lync when delivering webcasts.  Conversely, never “share your screen” to do a PowerPoint presentation.

All you have to do is click the “SHARE” button within Lync and select “PowerPoint Presentation”.  This will allow you to upload the deck into the Lync session & automatically convert it into an HTML5 presentation, complete with full animations, transitions, etc.

Please note that this process may take a few minutesto complete depending on the size of the presentation but the results are excellent and a little forethought/preparation before presenting should not be a big deal.

WHY AM I POSTING THIS?
I ask because ‘sharing’ one’s desktop to deliver a PowerPoint presentation is considered bad form with customers & attendees.  The reason for this is, while it may look okay to you as a presenter, from the stand point of an attendee (especially those with highly questionable bandwidth or weak QoS at their Internet gateway) pixel-level desktop sharing takes forever to do screen updates when using POWERPNT.EXE, especially at typical 1280×1024 resolutions & 24-bit color depth.

In a phrase, it can be downright PAINFUL & it’s inconsiderate to your audience.

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF UPLOADING THE .PPTX FILE?
When you load the presentation into Lync, there are 5 major benefits for attendees viewing the PowerPoint in this manner, instead of ‘screensharing’ POWERPNT.EXE:

1. IMMEDIATE SLIDE CHANGES
   All slide changes are immediate, eliminating the annoying pauses & frame rate issues that occur during screensharing while the screen refreshes on a pixel-by-pixel level.  For attendees with crappy bandwidth, a single 1280x1024x64k slide change can take close to a minute.  Meanwhile, the presenter is likely yammering away, while the slide hasn’t even appeared on his attendees screens & has no idea how bad the experience is on their end.
2. SMOOTH TRANSITIONS & ANIMATIONS
   All animation & transitions are supported and appear smoothly, whereas pixel-sharing can make animations at 1280x1024x64k run at less than a frame per second when delivered over a 64kbps connection, which can happen when the attendee is viewing the presentation with bad Internet access.  When the file is uploaded to the Lync session, the presentation is automatically scaled to the attendee’s local desktop resolution, so the presenter’s desktop resolution isn’t relevant.  (During desktop sharing for things like application demos, smart presenters normally shuttle down their resolution/color depth beforehand to minimize network I/O to the attendees)
3. CLIENT-SIDE SLIDE CACHING
   The attendee’s Lync client will pre-cache the entire PowerPoint presentation on the attendee’s machine locally and display the first presentable slide immediately, making bandwidth usage irrelevant after the initial slides of the deck are cached.  This allows presenter slide changes to occur immediately on the attendee’s screens & also provide…
4. SLIDE LOOKAHEAD/LOOKBACK
   If an attendee wants to look back at a previous slide, they have the ability to do so unless the presenter specifically restricts them from doing so.  This gives them freedom to review the content on their own.
5. POWERPOINT DECK DOWNLOAD
   Once uploaded to Lync, the attendee has the ability (unless again you’ve restricted them) to download the .PPTX for their offline use, which is a common request from attendees.