Webinar Wire

Features: Q&A

Posted by Ken Molay December 7 2007 9:22 AM EDT

3 comments

I'm starting a new series today. In each article I will discuss a single feature of event-related web conferencing software. We'll take a look at different implementation approaches by vendors and the advantages or disadvantages they offer.

Since this is a community blog, I encourage lots of input on the subject. Comment on my views, disagree, point out things I may have overlooked. Submit your own feature discussions. If you are a vendor and are particularly proud of a unique feature implementation in your product, you can send me an email and suggest that I add it to the series.

On to our first focus feature: Q&A

You would think this is the world's most obvious and trivial piece of functionality... Let attendees type a question and let hosts answer it. Every vendor checks off this feature on the ol' RFP checklist. But the variations on implementation in different products are mind-boggling.

Let's start with where the Q&A area lives. In some products, there is a dedicated space for audience entries and host responses embedded in the panels or framing that permanently surrounds the meeting content. ON24 is an example of this fixed-frame approach. Some products let the audience move that panel to different locations in the frame or undock it to free-float as its own independent window (Microsoft Live Meeting takes this approach). Adobe Connect Professional lets meeting organizers determine the size and position of the Q&A panel, but the audience can't alter that location on their own computers. Vcall places Q&A in its own window, separate from the main meeting content. It can easily get covered up by the meeting window and you might not see that a communication has arrived. Some products allow the meeting content to be displayed in full screen mode, where you don't see any surrounding control panels. I like WebEx's implementation in this case, where there is a small question mark icon at the bottom of the screen. An audience member or host can click on it to display the Q&A panel overlaying part of the screen and then minimize it back out of the way. And the icon changes color to alert you that a new message has arrived. It's just subtle enough to work well.

Now we move on to the issue of "who sees what." Some products have this fixed and unchanging, others allow configuration and control by the meeting host. Possible options include:

• All attendees see all submitted questions and responses
• Attendees don't see questions from other audience members, but all hosts/presenters see them
• Attendees can choose a specific role or person who should see their message
• Responses from hosts are seen only by the individual questionner
• Responses from hosts are seen by all audience members (usually with a corresponding display of the original question)
• Hosts can elect whether to answer a question privately or publicly

The practicality of these implementation choices can get very blurry in use. For instance, some products allow you to identify roles such as Administrator, Presenter, Host. All three types might be involved in running a meeting. If the audience Q&A selector allows them to send a message to "All Presenters" or "Host" or "Presenters/Host/Administrator" you can never tell which selection an attendee might choose. Some of your staff may see the question while others don't. This can be confusing during a group Q&A. I run into this problem all the time when using WebEx.

Then there is the issue of queue management. For some reason, Microsoft Live Meeting allows an attendee to have only one question submitted at a time. Until it is explicitly answered by a host, the attendee can only edit the original question... They can't submit an additional, separate one. I find this inexplicable.

Question management is the next area to examine. Most products have no significant management of questions in the queue. Either you answer it or you don't. But some vendors have added more functionality here. Intercall's Raindance lets hosts and presenters designate each question in the queue to assign it to a person for handling. As a professional moderator on client events, I long for a vendor to implement a very simple way for guest presenters to review the question queue and indicate "Ask This/Skip This" so I know which ones they want me to read during the Q&A session.

Q&A archiving and reporting is an area that most vendors give short shrift. This is a pity, as it is incredibly important to customers and gets harder as the size of events and audience interaction increases. Adobe Connect emails the questions to the designated host, with the entire list entered as freeform text in the email body (and for some reason, in reverse order to how they were entered during the session). WebEx saves the questions as text in a file, each question designated with the user name and time entered. Citrix GoToWebinar includes asked questions in the post-event attendance report, grouped by attendee. Unfortunately, for each attendee it runs together all questions asked during the event into a single large block of text.

Nobody has yet created the database I need for effective reporting after an event. Citrix is the closest, as I do want to associate each question with all the user information I need to properly respond to the person after the event. But I need to keep each of their questions separate, so I can delete unimportant questions and retain the ones of interest. Putting the information in an Excel spreadsheet format works pretty well, except that Excel won't display text cells longer than 255 characters. I want a separate record for each question, showing the time entered, the question text, whether it was answered during the event (or had a status change to "answered verbally"), and showing the registration info for the questionner. With this, I can easily sort and create an action file for getting back to my audience members.

Overwhelming, isn't it? Think about this the next time you see a bullet point on a product's feature checklist saying "Q&A available? Yes."