If you have a Live Meeting membership, you are ready to organize and attend meetings. This topic will help you get started with the most common tasks.

Note  If you do not yet have a Live Meeting membership, contact your Live Meeting account administrator. For more information about setting up your Live Meeting account, see How to Set Up Live Meeting.

This topic covers the following tasks:

• Start a Meet Now meeting
• Start phone conferencing
• Share a document in the Live Meeting console
• Invite other participants
• Join the meeting as an attendee

Start a Meet Now meeting

Meet Now meetings are a useful alternative to traditional scheduled Live Meeting sessions. A Meet Now meeting functions as a "virtual office" where you can spontaneously meet with others. If you have installed the Live Meeting Add-in for Microsoft Office Outlook, you can start a Meet Now meeting by using Outlook. Otherwise, you can use Live Meeting Manager to start a Meet Now meeting.

To start a Meet Now meeting by using Outlook

1. On the Live Meeting toolbar in Outlook, click Meet Now. Live Meeting creates an e-mail invitation that you can send to the meeting participants.
2. In the To box, type your full e-mail address (for example, somebody@microsoft.com).
3. Click Send to send the invitation. Live Meeting will display the Join Meeting entry page.
4. On the Join Meeting page, type your name in the Your Name box, and then click Join Meeting.
5. Live Meeting displays the Live Meeting console. You are now ready to conduct the meeting.

The meeting has now started, but you are the only participant. You will invite other attendees later.

To start a Meet Now meeting by using Live Meeting Manager

1. In your Internet Browser, enter the URL of your Live Meeting Conference Center. If you do not know the URL of your conference center, contact your Live Meeting account administrator.
2. From the Login to Live Meeting Manager page, type your user login in the User login box, and then type your password in the Password box. If you do not know your user login and password, contact your Live Meeting account administrator.
3. From the My Home page, in the Meet section, click Meet Now.

What to expect when you start a Meet Now meeting

When you click Send using the Outlook add-in e-mail invitation or when you click Meet Now in Live Meeting Manager, Live Meeting will determine if you have the Live Meeting console and, if so, if it is up to date. If you already have an up-to-date version of the Live Meeting console installed, Live Meeting will start the console for you. If you do not have the console already installed, or if Live Meeting finds a version that is out-of-date, it will display the Installation Page.

If you see the Installation Page, click Install and Join, and then click Open. When the installation is finished, Live Meeting will attempt to start the meeting console. If the console does not start automatically, follow the instructions on the Meeting Entry page to start the console and enter your Meet Now meeting.

When the console opens, the meeting has started, but you are the only participant. You will invite other attendees later.

Start phone conferencing

After the Live Meeting console has started, start the phone conferencing for the meeting. By default, Live Meeting displays the phone conferencing information for you. If you do not have a phone conferencing account, contact your Live Meeting account administrator.

To start phone conferencing

• Using your telephone, dial the phone conferencing number. When you are connected to your phone conferencing number, enter your participant passcode. When you are prompted, enter your leader passcode.

For more information, see How to Join a Live Meeting.

Share a document in the Live Meeting Console

With Live Meeting, you can share Microsoft Office documents and any other printable documents in the Live Meeting console for presentation and collaboration. As an example, the following procedure explains how to share an Office document, but the procedure for any printable document is the same. For more information about sharing documents, see How to Import and Share Content.

To share a document in the Meeting Console

1. In the meeting console, on the Share menu, click Share Document to View.
2. In the Choose a document to share dialog box, choose a Microsoft Office file that you want to share (for example, a Microsoft Word document).
3. Double-click the file name, and then click Continue. Live Meeting converts the file to Microsoft Office Document Image (MODI) format and then adds it to the Live Meeting.
4. To display the document, in the Resources pane on the left-hand side of the console, click the document that you want to share. If the document contains multiple parts (for example, if a PowerPoint presentation contains more than one slide), each part is displayed in the Thumbnails pane.

Now that the document is loaded and the phone conferencing is set up, you are ready to invite participants to your meeting.

Invite other participants

Beginning with Live Meeting 2005, you can invite participants from within the Live Meeting console. So you can see how meeting invitations work, in this example you will invite yourself, but the procedure for inviting others is the same.

To send a meeting invitation from within the Live Meeting console

1. From the Attendees menu in the Live Meeting console, click Send E-Mail Invite.
2. In the Attendees box, enter your full e-mail address, for example, someone@example.com.
3. In the Subject box, type a subject for the meeting.
4. In the Message box, type “Let us meet about the specification” or any other text that you want to use to personalize the meeting invitation.
5. Click Send Message, and then click OK.

Meeting invitations can take several minutes to arrive.

Join the meeting as an attendee

A meeting invitation indicates whether you have been invited as an attendee or as a presenter. In this example, you have been invited as an attendee.

To join a Meet Now meeting from an e-mail invitation

1. In your e-mail program, open the Meet Now invitation. In the message, click Click Here to Join Live Meeting.
2. Depending on how your conference center security is configured, you may do one of the following:
   • On the Join Meeting page, enter your name as you want it to be displayed in the meeting, the Meeting ID for the meeting, and either the Presenter or Attendee Key that was included in the e-mail invitation.) Then, click Join Meeting.
   • Go directly to the Live Meeting console as a meeting participant.
3. Once the Live Meeting console has started, enter the meeting as an attendee. Joining a meeting as an attendee starts a separate instance of the console on your computer.
4. You can now practice sharing documents between the two instances of the meeting console that you have started. For more information about sharing documents and other resources, see How to Conduct a Meeting.