The current moderator of a session has much more control than any other participant.  When a session starts, the person who initiated it is the moderator by default.  The current moderator can delegate moderator control to another participant by clicking on this popup control and choosing another participant from the menu.  However, the session initiator can take back moderator control at any time by clicking on the name of the current moderator and choosing themselves in the menu.  The initiator can also take moderator control from one user and assign it to another using this same approach.  The initiator always retains this extra level of control.

Session Size

Session size is controlled by a popup menu that the moderator can control, shown above.

Administrator Control

A user who’s account was marked as an “Administrator” on the server can also assign moderator status to anyone at anytime.  This allows users with administrator privilege (such as help desk personnel) to help manage the work flow of a session when a less experienced user initiates a call but does not understand how to effectively manage moderator assignment.

Moderation and Session Layout

The current moderator is the only user who can resize the session window, resize the panels within a session, or click on the tabs that change the presentation.  If the current moderator would like to allow another participant to make changes to the session layout, they can delegate moderator control to this other participant.

Moderation and Usage Policy

Collaboration services support three usage policies. A usage policy is a means for controlling who can use a service and when.  The moderator of a session has full control over assigning policy and managing permissions.  There are three modes that allow permissions to either be passed around cooperatively or explicitly assigned by the moderator. The role of moderator can also be granted as a privilege to another participant.

Policy Control

In the bottom left hand corner of each service is a set of three policy buttons.  These buttons are used to control who can use each service and when.  For more information on managing policy, see the Managing Policy page.

Quality vs. Guaranteed Service

When you first enter a conference, you may not be able to see the video or hear the audio of the other participants.  This happens when you are on a network using network address translation (NAT) where the network is not configured to allow certain types of data to reach you.  This can be resolved permanently by your systems administrator, however in certain circumstances this may not be possible or is not convenient.  If you do not receive audio or video from the other participants, you can temporarily correct this by choosing “Guaranteed Service” from the “Session” menu once you are in the session.  This will allow you to receive audio and video under almost any circumstance, however the performance of these services won’t be quite as good as it would be if you configure your network to avoid having to do this.

Network Monitor

The Network Monitor is a window that shows you real-time data rates for all communications activities within a session.  More information on the Network Monitor can be found here.

Cursor Feedback

Whenever a single user has sole control over a particular service, the position of their mouse will be shown on each of the other clients. When this is desired, it may be necessary to adjust the policy settings for that service to make this possible.  The cursor is shown when someone has the spotlight for that service, or if that service is moderated and permission is granted to a sole individual. If the spotlight or handoff policy is in use, than the cursor of the current user will always be shown to everyone.  These policy modes are covered in much more detail below.

This image shows a user who has joined a Video session and a Chat session.  When you switch between tabs while running multiple sessions, your audio and video is automatically muted as a session becomes hidden.  This allows you to switch between sessions much like when switching between lines on a phone conferencing system.  As a consequence, you can create privacy from a current session by simply switching to the Home tab.

Each session consists of a layout with two more services.  The services are all described in their own documentation, however they coexist in the layout of a session as shown below:

Close Session: If you choose “Close Session”, you will be asked if you if you want to leave the current session, similar to closing the session window in prior versions.  If you close a session, its tab will disappear.

Open Session in new Window: If you choose “Open Session in new Window”, this tab will disappear in your Contact Window, and the session will appear in a new and completely separate window.  This can be useful when you want to see more than one session at at time.  You can also collapse this separate window back into a tab in the Contact Window (see “Collapsing Sessions” below).

Close all Sessions: If you choose “Close all Sessions”, you will be asked if really want to close all open sessions.  Choosing OK will immediately end all sessions that you are currently involved in.

Collapsing Sessions

If you have chosen to open a session in a separate window, you can force the session to become a tab in the Contact Window at any time.  To do this, click on the arrow in the upper right corner of the session window, shown here:

Clicking on this arrow will produce a popup menu giving you the following options:

Clicking on this arrow will produce the context menu shown above.  If you choose “Turn Window back into Tab”, the window will close and your session will move into the Contact Window as a tab.  It will also become the active tab automatically.

Session Control

Above each session session is a popup control that shows who the current moderator is, and what the current session size is:

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Full Screen Mode

The Contact Window, as well as any separate Session windows, support a “Full Screen” feature.  At any time, you can press the Command-F key on the Mac (Control-F on Windows) to make the window go full screen.  You can press this key combo again to return your window to its previous (non-full-screen) size.   When in full screen mode, your entire desktop is hidden making Unity the focus of your entire experience, which hides distracting details and creates a more immersive experience.  To activate the hidden menu bar on the Mac, move your mouse to the top of the screen, this will cause the menu and Doc to appear.  To hide the menu bar once again, click on any part of your Unity window.

Initiator

The person who initiates a session always has total control of the session features.  Even when the initiator assigns the role of moderator (described below) to someone else, they never actually lose control of managing the session.  For this reason, any feature described below with respect to the moderator also applies to the initiator.

Managing Tabbed Sessions

To access options for tabbed sessions, click on the small arrow in the session’s tab.  The arrow is in the tab to the right of the title, shown here: