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Scenario: You want to use Novell Conferencing to host a webinar. As part of that you have a couple of requirements:

1. You want to preregister people, capture their full credentials and only allow those who have preregistered in.
2. You want to promote the webinar to you audience in an easy manner
3. During Registration and after the webinar is over you want to see who attended and to follow-up

Objective One - Let's look at what it takes to set up a Conference and enable registration.

The first thing you want to do is log into Conferencing and Schedule your meeting. Fill in things like the Meeting Name, Agenda, Start Date and Time options etc.
Some of the fields to pay attention to:

• Preregistered e-mail only - selecting this means people will not be able to enter the webinar unless they have pre-registered (more on this in a minute). This is nice because it allows you to capture additional information about your users but at the same time, if someone does not understand that they need to preregister, they will not be able to attend. Make sure your intentions are clear to your potential attendees.
• Require e-mail - this field means people will need to enter an email address upon logging in. This is useful in case you decide not to enfore pre-registration. At least you have this additional information about your attendees.
• Keys - If you enter anything here, your meeting will not automatically advertise itself (more on this in a minute) and your users will need to enter this before they are allowed into the meeting. It's a means of securing the meeting.
• Send e-mail when meeting starts - this is more of a courtesy to your users to remind them that the meeting is starting.

On the Features and Dial-in tabs set your options as appropriate. Lastly, on the Widget tab, there are some options that need to be set here:

• Countdown Time - this is a neat feature where it displays a timer that counts-down. The downside of this is that if you enable Preregistered Email Only and are expecting people to preregister prior to the meeting, they will not be able to do so if the meeting starts in less than an hour.
• Registration Fields - this is another key option. Enabling this allows the user to preregister with more than their email address. They will be prompted for things like their name, telephone number, company, etc upon registering.
• Show Recording and Show Chat are up to you. You will need to record the meeting for there to be any content here after the meeting is over.

Objective Two - Now that you have set up your webinar, you will want to promote it to your prospective audience.

Fortunately Novell Conferencing offers numerous ways for you to advertise and promote this event. Some of these include:

• Direct URL - This is probably the easiest and requires the least amount of work. At the top of your Conferencing screen is a Room URL. It will be in the form of "https://<organization name>.novellconferencing.com/<your name>". Simply ask your prospective attendees to visit this URL. They will be greeted with a list of upcoming conferences and can use the Widget to register
• Embed the meeting Widget - On the Widget tab of the meeting details there is some HTML code (see the screenshot above) that you and insert into a page on your WEB site or, as we do at Novell, into an HTML invite that you send out to people. It will appear to your users that the widget resides locally or on your WEB site and they simply complete it there.
• Social Media - across the top of the widget are links that allow you to publicize your event via a variety or social media otpions like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc. If you click on More, there are literally dozens more options for you to promote your event

The screenshot below shows the main Widget screen and the secondary Registration screen.

Objective Three - You need reports as to who is reigstered and who actually attended.

You will want to see how your marketing efforts are going to promote this event as well as follow-up with those that attended and those that were unable to. Simply log into Conferencing, select Search and search for Current/Future events. Find your event and click on View beside Registrants. Looking for the same information after the event is over is just as easy. Either specify a date range to search for or select Past and perform your search again.

That's all there is to it. Good luck with your webinars!

Disclaimer: As with everything else at Cool Solutions, this content is definitely not supported by Novell (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up).

It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.