Disconnecting Share Pods and Presenter Rights?

Report · Mar 30, 2016

I ran a seminar session through Connect this morning, as well as one yesterday. These occurred in two separate Seminar rooms (two different URLs, and both scheduled).

In each session, I had many strange things occur. I have the Share Pods connected throughout the seminar session, in several layouts and in the breakout rooms. I have a .pptx presentation shared in one of these pods that is shared throughout the session, so that everyone is seeing the same screen in the breakout rooms. Halfway through the scheduled session, half of my participants were seeing slides in the presentation that I was not seeing on my own screen. They would have to manually move forward in the presentation share pod to meet me on the correct slide. During this time, they were "participants" according to my attendee pod. One of my colleagues was also in the seminar session, and according to their attendee pod, several of our participants were promoted to "Presenters" halfway through our session, on each day. Neither my colleague or I made this change. How would they become presenters? This led to several of their microphones working in the main meeting room, but not the breakout rooms and I was unable to activate their microphones in the breakout rooms. Are these issues connected? How do I solve them?

While all of this was occurring, the chat pod on my screen showed when participants were typing, but did not show messages that had been typed and entered. My colleague was able to read these messages, as they appeared on her screen, in the same chat pod.

Any answers as to why these issues happened, or suggestions for solving these issues would be greatly appreciated.

Report · Mar 30, 2016

I think you have a few things going on here.

First, let's clarify how break out rooms work.

- User Permissions - When you start the breakout session, Participants assigned to the breakout rooms are automatically promoted to Presenter rights within the breakout room. This is done because the expected process of putting people in a breakout room is that they will need to interact with the content(s) of the room, not just be a participant in it. This functionality cannot be changed, and you would need to manually demote users to participants after starting the breakout session.

- Pods in breakouts - Each breakout room will have its own instance of the different pods. When a breakout room is activated for the first time it will mirror the content in the active layout of the main meeting room, but the content won't be linked. This means that if you continue navigating through a presentation in the main room users in the breakout rooms won't see the presentation advance and will have to move it on their own. This also means that users may be typing in the chat pods for those breakout rooms, but you won't see the chat messages in the main room. Now, you can load pod instances that are shared between the main layout and the breakout rooms, but this requires you to prep the breakout rooms ahead of time. The pods should show the name without '- Breakout X" at the top of the pod. If they show that they are associated with a breakout room, then their content won't be shared outside of that breakout room.

As to the audio, it would require further investigation to validate what happened. The symptoms you explain don't make sense to me (which could easily be me misunderstanding it), as I could see the reverse of your situation happening instead.

It may be worth investigating with Adobe support to see if they can identify any issues on the server side of things, but you'll need to be able to share the specific room and time it happened. You can contact support here: Adobe Connect Help | Adobe Connect Support

Report · Mar 30, 2016

Thank you for your reply. I am aware that in breakout rooms, participants are given presenter rights. And in the breakout rooms, they need to have these. My problem is that these presenter rights persisted when the breakout session was ended, and many of the participants had presenter rights after the breakout session ended, and in the main room.

As for the pods in breakout rooms, I manually removed the "breakout" version of the share pods and chat box, and replaced these with the main meeting room version, so they would be connected. I need them to be connected for the purpose of my seminars, so I have already ensured these are connected (the same version, not the breakout version) of each of these pods, in each room. My disconnect between the presentation slides/navigation occurred in the main meeting room, not during breakout sessions, and I think this may be due to the "sync" button not being active - although I'm not certain on that.

For the audio, I agree, the reverse of what I said would make a lot more sense - that's how the breakout rooms work. However, it was very odd.

Thank you for your suggestions. I will contact Adobe support and see if I can get their help.