Creating Online Seminars with Windows Media Technologies

Microsoft representatives deliver many seminars and presentations every day. Using Internet-based technology including Microsoft's Windows Media Technologies, Microsoft is able to deliver this information to a larger audience at a lower cost, and to more places around the world. To find out how Microsoft uses Windows Media Technologies to deliver seminars on http://www.microsoft.com/seminar/ , we spoke to Brad Brunell, Group Manager of Microsoft's Seminar Online and Distance Education. For more information on how this project started and how it operates, see the Online Seminars Q & A.

The Seminar Online and Distance Education group is also providing you with the opportunity to download AddASF, the tool they created to help speed the process of producing seminars. You can use this tool to create seminars of your own. Here are the steps his group takes when creating a new seminar:

Meet with the speaker and discuss with them that their PowerPoint slides will need to conform to a PowerPoint template so they look good when compressed and played over the Internet. This template limits the amount of text per slide, removes shadow effects from the text, and doesn't allow text size to go lower than recommended.

You can download the PowerPoint template they use (31K). This is a self-extracting zip file, and will extract the PowerPoint template to c:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Templates\Presentation Designs\. If your Microsoft Office is installed in a different directory, be sure to specify that directory instead. Next, launch PowerPoint, select Create a new presentation using Template, and then click OK. You will then see a list of the presentation design templates available to you. Double-click the one called SeminarOnlinePPTtemplate, and then create the presentation. If you want to apply this template to an existing PowerPoint presentation, select Format, then Apply Design, and then select SeminarOnlinePPTtemplate. The Seminar Online group has found that the optimal length per presentation is 20 minutes (longer presentations are rarely watched all the way through). So they instruct the speaker to either shorten presentations to 20 minutes, or break into multiple 20-minute or shorter presentations.
Determine the bandwidth of each feed you will offer. Will you offer only 28.8-Kbps feeds, or a variety to accommodate users on high-speed modems? The Seminar Online team creates content at 28.8 Kbps to accommodate the broadest range of users and to respect customers' already congested networks and wide area networks.
Calculate how much bandwidth you'll need by estimating the total number of concurrent connections you will have for each bandwidth.
Get your system ready to record.
Record the audio. High quality is critical to the Seminar Online and Distance Education team, so they record the audio at Microsoft's professional studio. They record and capture directly to digital using Sonic Foundry's Sound Forge at 44,100 Hz mono.
Optional: Finesse the audio. The audio experts at the Microsoft Studio run the audio through some pre-processing to get it into shape and get all clips consistent before they compress, using Sonic Foundry's Sound Forge .
Chunk the audio into separate ASF files. The Seminar Online team chops the audio file into separate ASFs, one for each slide the presenter speaks about. They do this so that all users on all clients can navigate to the slide they are interested in from a simple HTML link. Since their tool creates HTML pages for each PowerPoint slide with the naming convention IMGXXX.HTM, where XXX is the slide number, you must name the corresponding ASF files in the same fashion: The ASF for slide one would be IMG001.ASF, the ASF for slide 22 would be IMG022.asf, and so on.
Create the required directory structure. Add the following items to a new directory or file folder that you name whatever you like:
- PowerPoint presentation with no spaces in the name. The Seminar Online team routinely adds the length of time the speaker talks about each slide to the title of the slide so that it will appear next to the slide title on the index.
- New file folder called 800x600.
- New file folder called ASF that contains all of the ASF files.
Export the slides as HTML. To do this, open the PowerPoint presentation, select File, select Save as HTML, and then create a new layout that you can use again for future presentations by selecting the following:
- Select Browser frames.
- Select GIF.
- Select 640x480, 3/4 width of screen.
- Leave contact information blank (unless you want this information to be used).
- Select Use browser colors.
- Select the smallest button (this doesn't really matter, though, since the template they use contains totally different buttons).
- Select Include slide notes in pages.
- Select the 800x600 file folder you created in the last step as the location to place the HTML pages.
- Select Finish.
- Name the layout so you can use it again in the future. Brad's group calls it 800x600.
- The conversion to HTML will take place.
- Exit PowerPoint.
Copy the files. PowerPoint's Save as HTML feature will have created a new file folder in the 800x600 directory. Go into that new directory and copy all of the files to the root of the 800x600 directory. That will leave the original files intact in case you want to be able to go back and look at them later.
Install AddASF. This is the tool Brad's team created to help automate the process of creating the HTML pages and indexes they use. Install it in your /program files/ directory on the hard drive containing Windows. A Microsoft Word document explaining AddASF in detail is available (zipped, 21.8K).
Replace dummy logo with your own. In the /program files/addasf/standard/ directory you will find a file called logo.gif. You will want to replace that with your own company's logo. It is 240 pixels wide by 42 pixels high.
Run AddASF. Launch AddASF (when you installed it, it was added to the start programs, so select Start, Programs, AddASF). Make the following selections:
- Target directory -- Example: c:\presentation\ (don't select the 800x600 directory; make sure that you point to the root of the presentation directory)
- Set -- Presentation (single set of files) (batching presentations is not currently supported)
- Go
- The presentation will be created. You can look at it at /presentation/800x600/index.htm or /ppframe.htm.
Host the HTML pages and ASF files on your HTTP server.

In the future, look for enhancements to AddASF, like the ability to host the ASF files on a Windows Media Services server, and Netscape browser compatibility.