A Bright Idea of using DimDim.

Last week I had my first time of using DimDim as a tool for providing a presentation. Let me say at the beginning, I did not use this tool to it's full potential, or even half of it's potential.

The Situation
I finished writing the software for our new online meeting room management system and needed to demonstrate it to the managers who had rooms at their branches. The issue I'd had in past training sessions was that some of the managers were... less adroit at using a web browser. Since this session was more demonstration than training, I did not need them to remember which options to select, I only needed to show them the different options that were available. I wanted a tool to put everyone on the same page at the same time.


Using DimDim
I had the idea to use DimDim's desktop sharing even though it was a face to face meeting. That way, rather than telling them to look for a specific button and click on it, I could tell them just watch where the mouse went. Since the view could be made full screen, I could show them my desktop but it would look fairly close to what they would see when they did it for real. The idea worked with only two hitches which I'll explain below.

Issues
The issues I experienced during the live presentation somehow didn't happen when I did my full practice the day before. The first actually happened before the meeting began; the computers they were to sit in front of went into screen saver mode. This was easily solved by disabling the screen saver and putting the desktop sharing back to full screen. The second was more entertaining. DimDim is an online meeting platform with voip capabilities and so I started hearing myself echo from their computers. It took me a minute to realize why, but that was also quickly solved.

Future Use?
This first use was very much an experiment, but it was successful which has me wondering when I'll be able to use it again. Currently, I'm planning to use it to do the actual training on the system with the managers at their own branches as a further experiment. Right now, I consider DimDim to have a major drawback that might inhibit it's usefulness for training: it cannot let me turn desktop control over to another user (e.g. I can't say now you show me where to click to do X). Despite its drawbacks I think DimDim could be useful in providing future training.