I’ve found myself working with LiveMeeting a lot recently and so have more LM qwerks to discuss than SharePoint ones. The latest one, I’m pleased to say, has been accepted by Microsoft and will be added to the next cumulative fix. The jist is that a window changing form is recognised as a new window by the presenters client and as a result, the content is no longer shared. Below is a worked example

Open Calculator and share it

sharing

What you should see is the calculator with “currently sharing” in the title bar and the rest of the screen partially greyed out.

calc

Now switch to scientific mode and the presenter and the viewer will be kicked back to the “Nothing is currently being shared” screen.

For clarity, this isn’t restricted to calculator but it makes for a simple example. The problem is that in 2007 the product team have locked down the window security (this doesn’t happen in LiveMeeting 2005) and so when changing to scientific mode, LiveMeeting considers it a new window and so closes the sharing session. We were using this as a remote training tool for new starters. Often, trainers didn’t notice that the application wasn’t being shared and the new starter was too nervous to say anything and so sat there looking at a grey screen for an hour!

Microsoft’s current work arounds are:

  • Share the entire desktop (you can’t hand over control in this configuration)
  • Open a remote desktop session to another computer with calculator running and share the RDP client
  • Create a virtual PC running calculator and share the VPC

 

I’ll post an update once Microsoft release a fix.