The MeetingWeb Conversation

The basic conversational unit of Meeting Web is the comment. You enter comments in a meeting as either topics or replies. Every comment has a title and an author. To contribute to a meeting you post a comment, or if the meeting is screened, you can suggest a comment. To send a private message from the meeting directly to a comment's author, you send e-mail.

The Participants

To participate in a meeting, you register using a user name and password. Participants can post to an unscreened meeting and suggest comments to a screened meeting. Meeting originators or meeting moderators determine the level of access to a meeting.

Some meetings may allow anonymous access and participation; others may restrict anonymous users to reading comments only. In a moderated meeting, the moderator may limit participants to replying to pre-set topics. In a screened meeting, the moderator must approve a comment before it is posted. Comments may also be modified by a moderator who can re-order, re-title, copy, or move to a new meeting any comments as well as delete them.

Your View of a Meeting

The default meeting view is ordered by conversation in which topic and reply links are organized in outline format to make it easy to follow who replied to whom, or to subordinate information. You can expand or collapse a meeting's topics all at once, or one topic at a time. The Topic Index isolates on a single page the comment links for a single topic. The date view orders comments strictly by date received, listing them in reverse chronological order.

The Meeting View is your index to the meeting's comments. In Meeting View color-coded labels indicate comment status:

• New comments are unmoderated comments that you have not yet viewed or displayed.
• Modified comments have moderator changes that you have not yet viewed or displayed.
• Recent comments are those you have displayed in the last 24 hours
• Persistent comments are those you choose to keep visible after you have viewed them.

When you click on a comment's title, it is displayed in Comment View. Comment headers include status, title, author, date, and comment number fields. You set comment persistence on or off in the comment header. Optional summary and keyword fields appear in the header if included in an author's posting. The comment body includes any text you enter, files you paste or files you upload to display. Attachments are files you upload which appear as links appended to the comment body.

Creating Custom Views

To alter the number of comments you see when you enter a meeting or select a comment, you change your meeting preferences.

To display all a single topic's comment titles in Meeting View, you press the Show [All] button.

You can locate and recall special sets of comments by using the search command and setting search criteria. Found comments appear in a Search Results view. When you expand a search view to show context, a "F" status label indicates which comments were found in the search. You can export custom collections of comments to display, download, edit and print.

Browser-dependent Functions and Displays

Some older browsers may lack functions to make some MeetingWeb features available. Newer browsers generally support all of the following:

• uploading (copying) a file from your computer or network drive to either display an uploaded file in your posted comment or to attach an uploaded file to your comment.
• automatic updating of new comments by contacting the server running MeetingWeb to download posted changes within moments of recieving them
• automatic wrapping of text to adjust line length to fix within the text entry area.

The appearance of graphics, HTML formatted text and attachments will vary with computer displays, browser programs and versions, and browser settings.

Custom Modules

MeetingWeb is designed to be adaptable. If you are using a custom version of MeetingWeb, additional or modified terminology may be described in an online or printed supplement.

• Locate and select your meeting in the Browser's menu list of visited sites.

• Or, if your meeting was the previous link, use the Back command or button to return.

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