SQL Server Magazine

Microsoft provides NetMeeting 3.01 as a free tool that lets you communicate over a network with realtime voice and video technology, mark up or exchange graphics on an electronic whiteboard, transfer files, use a text-based chat program, share Windows-based programs with other users, and remotely connect to another computer.

When most people think of NetMeeting, they think of its audio and video capabilities, which often fall short of expectations in regard to transmission quality over a slow connection. However, NetMeeting offers many additional features that provide practical services to your organization. For example, NetMeeting can simplify your job through remote access and program-sharing capabilities without the associated cost of purchasing additional software. NetMeeting is a great tool for your Help desk or for employees in separate branch offices to use to collaborate on a project. A brief overview of NetMeeting will help you understand the software's features and illustrate how you can use NetMeeting on your LAN as a Help desk tool.

NetMeeting at the Help Desk
How often have you or members of your support staff tried to resolve end users' problems over the phone only to end up physically going to their system to solve the problem? Solving the problem in person is often more efficient than figuring out a solution over the phone because you don't have to spend as much time asking questions and attempting to walk the end user through the solution.

If you install NetMeeting at each workstation, you can use the software's Program Sharing feature to view on your system the same screen that end users are looking at on their systems. This feature lets you lock end users' keyboards and take over their systems, so you can remotely perform almost any action that you can perform in person. Thus, you save a lot of time that you can better spend resolving other problems.

NetMeeting's Help Desk Features
Before you install NetMeeting on your Help desk and end users' computers, you must decide which options to enable. The following features are the most useful NetMeeting options for a Help desk. You can find each of these features as options in NetMeeting's Tools menu. For a list of additional NetMeeting features, see the sidebar "Additional NetMeeting Features."

Chat. You can use the Chat feature, which is compliant with the T.120 standard, to exchange text messages with an end user during a troubleshooting session. (For more information about the T.120 standard, see the sidebar "The T.120 and H.323 Standards," page 84.) This function is also helpful for meetings that include multiple participants at separate machines within your organization (and for recording notes from such a meeting). To set up a Chat meeting, an end user configures his or her computer to be the host machine and decides who can participate in the group meeting. The Chat feature's Whisper option lets end users conduct a separate, private conversation during a group Chat meeting without interrupting the ongoing conference.

File Transfer. This feature lets you send a file in the background to the computer you're troubleshooting. In addition, end users can employ this feature during the meeting to send a file to one or all of a meeting's participants. NetMeeting gives each participant the option to accept or reject the file transfer. This feature is compliant with the T.127 standard.

Program Sharing. You can use the Program Sharing feature to run one or more programs on an end user's computer to resolve problems, and end users can use this feature to share programs with other meeting participants. This functionality provides a useful method for training multiple end users to use a particular software program. Only the person who wants to share the program needs to have it installed. That person can control access to the program so that he or she is the only person who has program control or can permit program control to other meeting participants. Program Sharing also lets you approve participants' requests to work in a program that you introduce: You can select one person at a time to work in the shared program.

An enhancement to the Program Sharing feature in NetMeeting 3.01 is that end users view the shared program window in a frame that participants can minimize on their desktops, thus enabling them to work on other programs. When users share more than one program, the software layers the programs on top of one another and collaborators use NetMeeting's shared program-window taskbar buttons to navigate program windows. The Program Sharing feature is compliant with the T.128 standard.

Whiteboard. This feature lets multiple users create and manipulate graphics information simultaneously. The whiteboard is object-oriented rather than pixel-oriented, so conference participants can manipulate the displayed graphics by clicking and dragging. To differentiate each participant's contributions, the software assigns different-colored pointers to each participant. The Whiteboard feature is compliant with the T.126 standard.

Remote Desktop Sharing. This feature, new to NetMeeting 3.01, lets you call a remote computer to access its shared applications and desktop (when the Remote Desktop Sharing service is running on the host computer). This feature lets you use a secure connection and password to access a remote computer in a branch office. You can also call your workplace computer from home and vice versa. The Remote Desktop Sharing feature is compliant with the T.120 standard.

Installing and Configuring NetMeeting
Microsoft includes NetMeeting 3.01 in Internet Explorer (IE) 5.0. You can also download this tool from http://www.microsoft.com/windows/netmeeting. NetMeeting 3.01 for Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 3 (SP3) or later requires a 90MHz Pentium processor or better, 24MB of RAM, and IE 4.01 or later. To use NetMeeting, you must have a 32-bit TCP/IP stack and install Winsock. NetMeeting doesn't operate properly over Serial Line Internet Protocol (SLIP) connections. To receive a quality connection for conference participants, NetMeeting works best over a LAN or with a fast Internet connection (i.e., 56KBps or faster) such as an ISDN, Digital Subscriber Line (DSL), or T1 connection.

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