Simple but handy web meeting tip
I host a lot of web meetings as part of my Salesforce.com consulting. Since my customers are all over the Northwest US and Canada, we don’t do many face-to-face meetings. Here’s a tip for making invitations to web meetings really easy to manage.
Most web meeting systems have URLs that are super long and ugly. They often look something like this:
http://meetingservice.com/meetingid=Ju84kdj32y&role=Attendee&Setting47=Kij3452kd
Because they are long, I’ve found they get broken by email clients into non clickable links more than I would like. I’d like the link to be shorter.
Even if the links are short, they have the meeting Id embedded in them. What happens when I need to change the meeting id at the last minute? The meeting URL is then invalid, and I have to communicate the change. I want flexibility to change the hard details of the meeting up to the last minute, without having to tell anyone.
So I use SnipURL to create a generic URL that I can then point to the long meeting URL. SnipURL is a free service that lets you create a short url for any other URL. The cool thing is that you can change the underlying URL at any time.
So for a user training I’ll set up a web meeting, get the huge ugly URL and go create a SnipURL like http://snipurl.com/sftraining. When the user clicks on this URL, they get redirected to the huge, ugly URL automatically. If something isn’t right and I have to change the meeting Id, all they have to do is click on the SnipURL again to get the new meeting URL.
Really simple technique, but I get tons of benefit from it.
