UM Libraries Staff Working From Home: Virtual Meetings

Do not attempt to initiate virtual meeting software from your remote desktop.  This may result in you not being able to see or hear the meeting or have problems with connection speed.  Copy the link and add it to your local computer browser outside of the remote desktop environment.

Consider accessing your email and calendar from a browser on your local computer http://owa.ad.umanitoba.ca That way, anything you click on will open on your local computer.

The Accessibility Standing Committee has identified a couple of resources to help make virtual meetings more accessible to participants.

Whether you’re hosting or participating, some of these tips may be useful.

• Accessibility in Video Conferencing and Remote Meetings from Drake Music
• Good practices for accessible virtual meetings from the University of Minnesota

Email Les Moor (Chair, ASC) if you would like to recommend another resource for this list.

Each librarian has received an invitation to Webex from IST.  Locate that email subject line "University of Manitoba has invited you to Cisco Webex" and click on the "activate" button and follow directions. For support staff, you may contact IST and ask for an invitation if you have not yet received one.  This invitation is NOT necessary to attend a Webex meeting. 

Meeting invitation link issues (Join meeting is missing or link not working):

• Navigate to UM Webex site
• Enter the meeting, session, or event number into the Meeting Number field.
•  Enter your name, email address, and the meeting password.

Want to know how to initiate a WebEx meeting invitation in Outlook so that participants will have the meeting in their calendar with the instructions embedded in the meeting? This eliminates the need for putting meetings in calendar manually and looking for joining instructions in inbox at time of meeting. Install WebEx Productivity Tools!

"Webex Productivity Tools is a separate package from the Webex Meetings desktop app for WBS39.10 and later versions. Productivity Tools supports integrations with other applications, such as Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), Microsoft Skype for Business, Microsoft Lync, Internet Explorer, and IBM Lotus Notes." [from the site]

There are a few different ways you can join a meeting in Teams:

• From the Outlook invitation email that you received, click “Join Microsoft Teams Meeting”.
• From your Outlook calendar, open the appointment and click on the ‘join Microsoft Teams meeting’ link.
• With Teams open, Open the Calendar from the purple bar along the left side of your Teams screen, then open the appointment and click “Join Microsoft Teams Meeting”.
• If you get a pop-up reminder about the meeting you can click “Join” directly from the pop-up a few minutes before the start time.

Once you have joined the meeting:

• The video and microphone features are optional. If you want to be seen by others, turn your video on, if not, you will ‘appear’ online, but only your initials will be seen by others.
• If you have a microphone either built-in or attached to your device, please keep yourself muted, and only unmute yourself if you are going to speak, otherwise any background noises will be heard by all, which can be very distracting.
• If you do not have a microphone, or wish to not enable it, you can still communicate by asking questions or commenting in the chat window. Click on the chat symbol and the chat bar will appear on your screen…