Over the last few months, we have experienced two failures when attempting to display presentation content to remote sites for seminars hosted in MP2015.  We have identified the causes of these failures.  In the first case, Computer Support staff made a mistake when setting up the Polycom in MP2015.  I’ve clarified operator instructions to avoid repeating that mistake.  In the second case, the tech staff did everything they were supposed to do to setup and test the connection ahead of time.  However, the guest speaker’s Mac Air would not adjust its display resolution to match any of the many compatible modes required by the Polycom graphics processor.  This was the first time we have encountered this problem.  Computer Support staff  delayed the start of the seminar by 10 minutes while we attempted, without success, to correct it.

Because some of these seminars are very critical, requiring participation by faculty, we will in the future make the following adjustment to our video conferencing setup procedures:  Since it is unreasonable in many cases to expect seminar speakers to use our laptop to present, we will always attempt to use the speaker’s laptop if asked.  However, if we encounter problems with display of content because of some incompatibility with the speaker’s laptop, we will immediately switch to using the Polycom’s camera, pointed at the projector at the presenter’s location, to display content remotely.  This is not optimal, but we believe this is a better approach than delaying a seminar start time and/or distracting the presenter with technical details.

Important note for hosts and event coordinators:  Please forewarn a speaker if you know that the seminar will be video conferenced.  Speakers should also be reminded to have a copy of their presentation files on a thumb drive or some quickly accessible cloud service so that Computer Support staff are able to move those files to our Polycom laptop in the event of more severe technical difficulties.  One example where this might be necessary:  The content not only fails to display remotely, but cannot be displayed locally even via a direct connection to the projector.