No matter how many times you have attended a webinar or participated in a Zoom meeting, attending a multi-day multi-disciplinary virtual conference and reaping its rewards is a new challenge. This is the same for those attending the Presentation Summit for the first time and those who have attended or spoken at it for ten times, 15 times, 18 times.
This is a new experience for all of us and these pages carry the hope that we can smooth the road for you a bit.
For all subsequent entry to the platform, use the simple URL of www.presum20.com.
From the home page, you will see your profile on the left sidebar. We pre-populated your profile with any information you might have supplied to us during registration, and if you have attended the conference in prior years, your profile might have inherited a photo.
No matter what your starting point is, the EDIT link is your gateway. Once there, you can:
Add a photo. You can choose anything at all, but head shots are best, given the size and shape.
Add skills. This is big, because our platform uses an AI algorithm to suggest others whom you might want to meet. The more info you give here, the smarter the matchmaking engine is.
Your bio. We will have likely given you a head start by pre-populating how many times you have attended the Summit and anything you told us about yourself during registration.
Social media and contact information. You decide how much to divulge.
A completed profile, canine photo optional
The Virtual Summit is designed to be a multi-display experience. You are not limited to one browser window or even just one device. You can log in more than once; you can log in more than 10 times if you want. The Summit platform is 100% mobile enabled, but the simple fact of virtual life is that the larger your display, the more robust your experience will be.
This is especially relevant for seminars that involve use of software. For those times, when you are being asked to follow a cursor as it opens menus, clicks on icons, and other subtle movements, you will want your browser window as large as possible and you will want the seminar video frame to be full screen. That will not leave much real estate for other conference activities, such as visiting an exhibitor, chatting with a conference buddy, or perusing the upcoming seminars.
Here is where we recommend simply opening additional browser windows and/or spreading out to a second display. The easiest way to accomplish this is to hold Shift+Enter while clicking links; that will open them in additional browser tabs, at which point you could choose to drag them off to other places.
You can also be logged into the conference on computer and phone. Many like to follow the Chat on their phones while watching presentations on their big screens. It’s all good.
Here is the first, last, and perhaps only piece of advice you might need on navigating seminars:
Click LIVE NOW.
All of our keynotes and seminars air live — there are no pre-records — so whatever is happening now can be found from the LIVE NOW icon. If it is a keynote address or a general session, you will be taken immediately to the live streaming page, where you can watch and interact right away. If we are in breakout seminars, one of three things will happen:
Because these seminars are streaming live, you cannot back up and rewatch if you arrive late. So don’t be late! That said, we will capture the streams each evening and make an on-demand recording of the seminar available within 36 hours. Those recordings will remain available until Feb 2021, as will your access to the conference platform.
Veterans to the Summit are familiar with the torture we inflict upon those who can’t decide which fabulous-sounding seminar to attend. So too will they recall our tradition of Encore Performances, where we repeat a few of the sessions, based on patron voting. None of that will be necessary this year — torture or encores — as you can watch any seminar as many times as you want across the next six months.
Furthermore, we will continue to take registrations into the platform until next February. So tell a friend…
From the Home screen or from the horizontal links across the top, the Schedule of Events is an easy-to-navigate list of all seminars, keynotes, special events, and breaks. As you hover over a particular session, its background will tint slightly. That entire block is a link, so click or touch any session to see more detail about it. (And on a browser, using the Shift+Enter technique will open the session in a new tab, leaving the daily schedule in place in the original tab.)
Building your personal schedule: If you come across a seminar that you know you want to attend, you can add it to your personal schedule, called My Schedule. This is done one of two ways:
Once an event is on your personal schedule, you will receive notifications about it within the platform. You will also receive notifications on your mobile phone if you have downloaded the Swapcard app and logged into the conference.
This becomes a question of how you expect to interact with the Summit. When we are all together in a hotel and you are part of a captive audience, you’re going to come down from your hotel room in the morning and most likely stay in the ballrooms all day. But with a virtual event, we can’t make that kind of assumption (we can only hope!). So it comes down to this:
We want to reiterate: you do not need to register for seminars in order to attend them. You can duck in an out of our keynotes and seminars freely and easily. You don’t even have to do it quietly. You can eat an entire bag of Doritos while you watch. There are some advantages to virtual…
Your personal schedule serves a deeper purpose than just reminding you about seminars you want to attend. From the My Schedule icon, you can also:
We realize that our conference patrons reside over an expanse of a dozen time zones and we know that some will find it easier to connect with others in the early-morning or evening hours. We chose not to include all of those times as available meeting slots, requiring most of our patrons to purposefully unselect them as available times. To connect with fellow conference attendees outside of conference hours, just send them a connection request and/or see what contact information they might have chosen to make public.
While we recommend watching our seminars on the largest screen possible, the smallest screen you own could prove invaluable during the conference dates. You will be notified within the platform of any requests, chats, meetings and favorited seminars, but if you are away from your computer, then what?
This is why we recommend that everyone download the app and log in to the Summit. That way, you will receive notifications on your phone of people wanting to connect with you, meetings you have scheduled, and seminars you have favorited.
One of the most enduring and evocative experiences across the Summit’s 18-year history is its Help Center — where our patrons can go to get any question answered. We have a dedicated team of four experts, recognized by Microsoft as such, and numerous presenters hang out and participate. (More on “hanging out” soon.)
To visit the Help Center, go to the Home page and find its icon top-right. Once there, you have the following options to connect with the team:
Lots of ways to connect with our Help Center team.
We created a simulation of an actual Help Center visit. Check it out…
Nearly a dozen of our partners will be gathered in our virtual Expo Hall and we encourage you to visit them. Like the Help Center, the Expo Hall is completely set up for full engagement: video, chat, demos, downloads.
We have encouraged all of our partners to offer virtual swag, in the form of downloadable certificates and drawings, and many of our partners will be changing out their offerings on a daily basis, so don’t be shy about making frequent trips there.
Finally, there is our hangout for free-form discussions, where you can chit-chat, ask questions, and participate in surveys. This virtual lounge will be up and running two weeks before the conference begins, and serves two purposes:
If someone leaves a comment or makes a suggestion for a topic that you agree with, give it a thumbs up or a heart.