Use our Outlook plug-in to schedule meetings straight from your PC! Fuze Meeting has an Outlook plug-in so you can schedule meetings right from Outlook!

This feature is available on PCs (not Macs, sorry) and on Outlook 2007-2010! Need that to change? Make a request or cast your vote! (2011 is coming)

Want to install the plug-in right now? Great! Here’s a quick-start guide!

QSG – Outlook_PlugIn

18 hour warning: Support webinar tomorrow!!!! Register on Eventbrite!

We’ve been blogging about our new support site since the launch and NOW, we’re happy to offer you our very first in a series of webinars:

Tuesday, July 26^th at 11 AM PST

Introducing New Fuze Support:

Knowledge & Help at Your Fingertips

Hosted by:  Vice President of Product Management, Greg Saiz

What’s new about Fuze Support?:   We’ve created an interactive, all-inclusive,  Customer Support Management system

• Customer self help area – customers can post their own questions and get community answers
• Greatly improved FAQ area and knowledge base
• Integrated online chat
• Suggest features and vote on them- customers can see and add items to our Roadmap!
• Support transparency and visibility – customers receive notification of ticket updates
• Social media integration – monitor social networks and respond from Zendesk
• Counts for problem frequency and notification for affected customers
• Simplified ticket management for support staff
• Support metrics, reporting, alerts and rules

If you’re a heavy Fuze user, then this is one webinar you don’t want to miss! We’ll show you how to get your questions answered quickly and efficiently. Register on Eventbrite now or join the webinar LIVE at 11 AM PST!!!

First: What’s LDAP?  LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) is an application protocol for accessing and maintaining distributed directory information services over an Internet Protocol (IP) network. In layman’s speak it’s the protocol that allows you to use a single sign on over multiple accounts on the same IP address. Meaning, you can use your ever-changing work email/password to sign into multiple systems and programs.

And now, including Fuze Meeting!

For best results we recommend deploying our LDAP server behind your firewall.  If your LDAP server is accessible over the public internet, we can integrate without an appliance.

Learn how by reading more here!
FuzeBoxLDAP

Have more questions? Be sure to visit our support pages for more tips, tricks and help!

The truth is, if you’re hosting a webinar, it’s pretty likely that you’re an expert in your subject area and you could probably talk for days and days about it.

Control yourself (and respect your audience.)

Whet their appetite and say enough “big picture” stuff to establish yourself as an expert, but most importantly, give your audience confidence that respect their time. With your Fuze Meeting subscription, you can have as many webinars as you like for the same monthly fee, so consider splitting up your 2 hour monologue into a few bite-sized sessions.

Avoid PowerPoint fatigue and focus on your message instead!

In the end, you’ll leave them wanting more.

As you perhaps have noticed, the Fuze Meeting support team is migrating our support tools and processes to a different system.  The largest component of this migration, our fuzemeeting.com support pages, is now up!  Go to Fuzemeeting.com and you’ll now notice a new left-hand panel for chat/problem reporting and a new top level navigation item for support – both utilizing Zendesk.  You can also go directly to our support pages by visiting http://support.fuzemeeting.com.

With our new support tool, what can you expect?

• Customer self help area – now, you can post your own questions and get community answers
• Greatly improved FAQ area and knowledge base
• Integrated online chat
• Suggest features and vote on them – as a customer, you can see if your desired feature is on the roadmap and if not, you can add it!
• Transparency and visibility – receive notification of ticket updates
• Social media integration – that’s right! We can connect your tweets to our support system!

Like any great SaaS service, its only as good as we make it, so please join our support community and start communicating with our team and other Fuze users!

By now, I’m sure most of you know that uploading content to your online meeting is the best way to have your presentation or images look their best. BUT… our stunning PowerPoint/Keynote upload functions can only look their very best if your presentations are as slick as you are, so here’s a list of tips to get you on your way to a jaw-dropping presentation!

Free Templates and Backgrounds

Template Wise – A free resource for easy to use templates and backgrounds.

Free PowerPoint Templates – Over 1000 free templates and backgrounds

Free PowerPoint Templates from Indezine – Overall a great resource for PowerPoint, it’s no surprise that Indezine has 1000’s of free templates to offer!

Free images and clip art

Creative Commons – Perhaps the most well-known site for commercially available and royalty free images, this site has helped many of us out of an image pickle.

MorgueFile – a great resource for royalty free images (make sure you read the license info)

Tips and Tricks

Presentation Tree – Articles that help you get the most out of your presentation! Learn about sales and more with titles like 5 Great Secrets of the Pros” and Give Your Presentation a Strong Closing by Using a Call-to-Action Slide.

PPT FAQ – Answering some of PowerPoint’s frequently asked questions, one article at a time with articles like Why are my PowerPoint files so big? and Recovering a Corrupt Presentation.

Indezine’s Blog – These guys are up-to-date on everything from presentation and collaboration news to public speaking! Check out articles like On Speaking Like A Pro and Why Use PowerPoint at All? A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words.

The PowerPoint Pre-Show Checklist (pdf) – Things like ‘turn off the screen saver’ may seem obvious now, but when you’re about to present your career changing business plan, you’ll be stoked to have these handy 20 points in your back pocket.

Lighting, clothing & background

Well, a week into your video conferencing subscription, and I’m sure you’ve noticed…there’s a way to do it well, and then there’s the “other way.” Needless to say, there are about 4000 little tips and tricks we could dish out, but for NOW, we’re going to focus on the three most important and easiest to master.

1. Lighting matters. The difference between one light bulb is, well, the difference between night and day. The only difference in these images below is flipping on one little desk lamp. So do yourself a favor and brighten up!

Tip: If you have a bright light shining right at you and you *still* look dark, you’re probably backlit. If able, spin yourself around so you’re facing into the light, and I bet you’ll look a lot better.

2. Dress to impress. Even though your pinstriped suit with plaid shirt may be your favorite combination for the office, it would be a total nightmare in a video conference. When dressing to stream video, do your best to wear solid muted colors.

( On this one, we’re going to assume that our customers participate in daily activities such as showering and ironing, so we’re not going to go into details of ‘work appropriate clothing.’ However, as a rule of thumb…if it’s not a shirt you would wear to the office, best to not wear it in a video conference.)

3. We can see your background. Pay attention to what’s behind you before you start your meeting. Some people won’t notice, but many will. Your environment will speak volumes about you.

Do you have a messy home behind you? This may make you appear disorganized.
Coworkers surfing the ‘net? This might question the work ethic in your office.
A Christmas tree still up in April? I mean…if you can’t hit *that* deadline…

Tip: Turn the camera on before you actually go into the meeting and try to objectively scan your background for potential red flags.

Let us know if you have any video conferencing pet peeves in the comments section!

Our video conferencing is amazingly intuitive, but just in case you need some help, here’s a handy little guide to get you started. Now…just a reminder, video conferencing is only available as part of our professional package but you can upgrade at any time.

Once you login to Fuze Meeting from your host account, a frameless browser window is launched and you’ll see a “Start Vid Conf” button on your home screen.

Click on the “Start Video Conf” button. A column will expand on the right and a “Web Camera Setup” dialogue box will appear. Choose your camera and resolution (choosing Auto for your resolution should be fine…more on that later).

Once you hit OK, your video stream will appear in that right column while your content and desktop sharing remain in center of the screen. But what if you want even MORE space to view your content or MORE space to view your video feeds? No Problem!

If you chose to undock the video panel, all the video feeds (up to 10, even though you’re only seeing one in this example) will appear in a separate window. This is especially useful if you work with two screens! Then you can have shared content in one screen and video feeds in the other.

You can use the icons at the bottom of the video conferencing window to:

• adjust your video camera settings
• pause your video feed,
• end video conferencing for all participants
• redock your video streams

That’s about it for getting the video conferencing going. If you have any questions or would like to see blog posts on other topics, let us know in the comments!

Keep visiting our blog! We’ll be adding tons of useful tips and tricks in the coming weeks!

March 30^th will most certainly go down in the FuzeBox history books because today….TODAY we launched video conferencing across all platforms!

Some of the great stuff you can expect with our newest update!

Video conferencing from any device or to any device! We’re currently available on the iPad 2, Honeycomb & Froyo on the Android tablets, Android phones and Macs & PC’s!

Our multi-party HD video conferencing app will be launching soon on the iPhone, so stay tuned for updates. This immersive and awesome experience is only available on our Professional packages…but if you sign up now at $69/mo, you’ll be spared the price increase (it’s coming!)

Clutter Free Meeting Space! Our new interface allows your content or video conference to take center stage, while meeting controls disappear into the background.

Upgrades to audio! VoIP has come out of beta and sounds so much better for it! And just in case you prefer phones, we’ve also added new international numbers that you can check out over here.

Obviously, we have so much more to say and we can hardly contain ourselves, but please let us know what you’d like to know from us! We’re here to help!

As you know (because we’ve said it over and over and over again), Fuze Meeting allows you to export your Apple Keynote files and use them as shared content in a Fuze Meeting.

While our Keynote support great, some folks do better with a few instructions, so you have 2 options. you can watch our webinar replay of how to do it, or you can scroll through the embedded PDF below!  Let us know if you have any questions.

Exporting_Keynote