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Frequently Asked Questions
Setup and Configuration
You can get started in just a few steps:
- Request a subdomain for your event or organization.
- Enter the title, start and end dates of your event.
- Import sessions and presentations from an Excel sheet or create them manually.
- Customize the presenter invitation email template and set upload deadlines.
- Optionally enable automatic reminder emails.
- Send the invitations and wait for presenters to upload their presentation files.
If the system offers exporting data to a CSV or an Excel file it’s usually an easy and quick task to adapt it to Preseria’s Excel import template.
Depending on the system, we can integrate directly with your provider to retrieve session data from their database.
To set up and create your event’s sessions and presentations in Preseria you need the following information, which you can either enter by hand or import using our Excel template:
(Required information in bold)
- Session Title
- Session Location/Room
- Session Start Date & Time
- Session End Date & Time
- Presentation Start Time & End Time – or – Duration ( in minutes)
- Presenter Email Address
- Presenter First Name
- Presenter Last Name
- Presentation Title
More information on the fields and requirements can be found in our Excel Import Tutorial
We recommend you use our default email template as a starting point and that you send it between 8 – 2 weeks before your event starts. Additionally, you may want to set up an automatic reminder to be triggered 1 week before the event (or 1 week before your upload deadline) that reminds presenters who haven’t uploaded files to their presentations yet.
Start by removing any sections from the default email template that aren’t relevant to your event and add your event specific information such as:
- Opening hours of your Speaker Ready Room.
- A link to your event’s PowerPoint slide template.
- Information about upload deadlines.
- Information about AV equipment (comfort monitor, timers, clickers, microphones, etc.).
You are free to create as many custom Email Templates in Preseria as you need and you can use different email templates for different sessions.
Lastly, you might want to create a custom email banner image that will be at the top of your email invitations. See the “Upload an Email Banner Image” section in our Getting Started guide.
You can enable deadlines for some or all the sessions of your event. Sessions can have different upload deadlines.
When a presenter logs in, they will see the session deadlines for each of their presentations. If the deadline of a particular session has passed the presenter will not be able to upload new files, delete previously uploaded files or re-order files for their presentations in that session.
Session deadlines only affect presenters, not organizers. Organizers can always upload files on behalf of a presenter, and they can temporarily disable deadlines for specific sessions to allow certain presenters a last chance to upload.
The time and date of the deadlines will be shown in the presenters local timezone.
Example:
The event takes place in Los Angeles (Pacific Time / GMT-7) and the upload deadline for all sessions is Thursday, August 5th, 2021 at 6:30 pm. A presenter logs in from New York (Eastern Time / GMT-4) and sees that the upload deadline in his timezone is August 5th, 9:30 pm.
Managing Sessions and Presentations
Any organizer with write access to an event (conference or a particular session) can upload a file on behalf of a presenter. The fastest way to add a file on behalf of a presenter is:
- Inside the event, click on “Search” to bring up the list of all presentations.
- Start typing in the presentation title or the first or last name of the presenter.
- Once the filtering starts narrowing down results and you see the presentation you want to upload a file for, click it.
- Now you should be able to upload files as long as you’re either the admin of the event or has been given write permissions to that event or session.
Sometimes a speaker cancels last minute and you need to cancel the presentation. Other times you might need to move a speaker’s presentation to another session. Here are some common scenarios and how to handle them. The first few steps (to locate the presentation) is common for all actions:
How to quickly find the session of a presentation:
- Inside the event, click on “Search” to bring up the list of all presentations.
- Start typing in the presentation title or the first or last name of the presenter.
- Once the filtering starts narrowing down results you’ll eventually see the presentation you are looking for. Click it to open it, then navigate one level above using the breadcrumbs (to get to the presentations’ session).
MOVE: Move a Presentation from one Session to Another
- Click the row of the presentation to show its context menu.
- Click on “Move” and select the session you wish to transfer the presentation to.
- Confirm your choice. The presentation will now be moved to the last position (last presentation chronologically) in the other session.
- Open the session you moved it to and drag-and-drop it to its correct position.
REPLACE: Replace an existing Presentation with a new one.
- Click the row of the presentation to show its context menu.
- Click on “Delete” to permanently remove this presentation slot from the session (and delete any uploaded files).
- Confirm your choice. The presentation will now be removed from the session and the starting times of the other presentations in the session will automatically be re-calculated.
- Add a new Presentation, enter the speakers details, confirm and re-order the presentation into it’s correct position.
CANCEL: Cancel a presentation from it’s scheduled session
- Click the row of the presentation to show its context menu.
- Click on “Delete” to permanently remove this presentation slot from the session (and delete any uploaded files).
- Confirm your choice. The presentation will now be removed from the session and the starting times of the other presentations in the session will automatically be re-calculated.
- Either add a break in the deleted presentations timeslot, add a replacement presentation or a placeholder presentation.
A presenter is a user who has at least one presentation slot in your event’s schedule. The fastest way to change a presenter’s information is to follow these steps:
- Inside the event, click on “Search” to bring up the list of all presentations.
- Start typing in the presentation title or the first or last name of the presenter.
- Once the filtering starts narrowing down results and you see at least one of the presentations of the presenter you want to edit.
- Click on one of the results, then go one level up (to list the presentations in the current session)
- Now click on the presenter’s presentation slot to bring up its context menu.
- You should now be able to change the presenter’s name and email address.
- Save your changes.
If you’ve added the wrong details (first name, last name, email address) of a speaker for a presentation the best way to deal with this is to delete the presentation from its session and to add a new one with the correct information. Follow these steps:
- Navigate to the session where the presentation is located.
- Delete the presentation (first download any uploaded files, if necessary)
- Add a new Presentation with correct presenter details.
- Re-order the newly added presentation to its correct position in the schedule.
PS: If you’ve already sent out email invitations, and the newly added presenter isn’t already in the system, you will have to send a new email invitation to the newly added presenter.
If you need to add files to a session that isn’t part of the normal presentation schedule you can add a “Placeholder Presentation” and set its duration to 0 minutes.
Move the placeholder to the beginning of the session (1st position). As long as you have set the duration to 0, it won’t affect the starting times of the other presentations in the session.
If you need to invite a moderator to upload their files for a session, just treat them like a normal presenter, but set the duration to 0 minutes and move them to the top of the session.
Placeholders are a collection of files that can be re-used across sessions. They are convenient when you want to distribute identical files to different rooms, without having to upload them again and again.
They are very useful when you have a set of media files, for example videos to be shown during breaks in all session rooms. Just upload the videos to a placeholder once and then click “Add Placeholder” and select “Add Existing Placeholder Presentation”.
If you modify the files in a placeholder that is used across sessions, all the sessions will get the updated files automatically. This also applies to deleting and adding files.
If you have a session with multiple presenters/presentations and you are planning on doing the Q&A for all presenters together, at the end of that session, you can either just add an empty Q&A placeholder presentation (and set its duration to the amount of minutes set aside for Q&A), or you can just add a Break.
If each presenter have X amount of minutes to present and Y minutes for Q&A, you can add small breaks between each presenter or inform the presenter’s that their presentation slot is X+Y minutes and that their presentation must not exceed X minutes for speaking, as the audience will need to have Y minutes for Q&A. The last option is probably the easiest if you have lots of short 10 min. presentations whereof 7 min is dedicated to the talk and 3 to Q&A for each speaker.
To give someone read-only access to either an event (and all it’s sessions) or a particular session (and all its presentations), you first need to add them to your account. Only the organizer can perform this action.
Once a person is invited as a co-organizer, you can give them read permission by opening a sessions Permissions List (click the padlock button, next to the settings button), selecting their name and choosing Read Only.
When that person now logs in they will be able to open and view that session as well as download and view any uploaded files.
Uploading Presentation Material
As a presenter you will receive an email with instructions and a unique login link to the event’s upload portal. Usually you’ll receive this email 8 – 2 weeks before the event starts. You can not upload a file before you’ve received the invitation email from the event organizer. If you need to make modifications, login at the event’s upload portal, which you will find a link to in the email from the organizer.
The website address for your event is in one of two forms:
- https://eventshortname.preseria.com
- https://customername.preseria.com
Where “eventshortname” typically is the shortname of the conference and “customername” is the name of the organization hosting the event.
If you’ve forgot your password you can reset it by clicking the “Forgot your password?” link on the login page of your event’s upload portal.
You may also login without a password by requesting a magic login link. Just enter your email address (the one that received the Preseria email invitation) and click the “Email me a link” button.
The conference organizer will most likely have specified which file types are accepted in the email invitation you received. The user interface will allow you to upload many different formats, including .zip files, but you should always follow the instructions in the email invitation to be sure that your presentation material will work as expected when you are presenting live.
Unless configured otherwise by the organizer, Preseria accepts:
- PowerPoints
- PDFs
- Apple Keynote files
- Videos
- Images
- Zip files (for example for bundling fonts)
For those presenting a PowerPoint with media, we recommend you take a look at this page: “Tips for improving audio and video playback and compatibility”.
Yes, you can add multiple files to one presentation slot. The files will be given a number starting on “1” and ordered from first to last. Drag and drop the files to change the order. When presenting, your files will appear in the order you specified.
For presenters there’s a size limit of 2 GB per file. This limit does not apply to organizers. Contact your organizer if you need to upload files larger than 2 GB.
If the organizers have enabled upload deadlines for certain sessions then presenters themselves can not make changes after the deadline.
Organizers may upload files on presenters’ behalf or temporarily disable the upload deadline. This is completely up to the organizers to decide. The Preseria support team will not make changes on behalf of presenters without involving the organizer first.
Please contact your event’s organizer if you missed a deadline. You’ll should be able to reach them by replying to the email invitation.
When uploading presentation material you’ll see a progress bar that goes from 0% to 100% for each file you selected to upload. Once a file is successfully uploaded it will appear in the list of files for your presentation and your upload task is complete.
Preseria will sometimes show a warning next to a successfully uploaded PowerPoint file. That means that Preseria has detected issues with your slide deck. Some of the issues are often safe to ignore, others are more important to fix. Here are the most common issues and recommended actions to resolve them:
Non-critical issues:
- Slide dimension is not 16:9: Almost all projectors and TVs today use a the 16:9 widescreen image format. If your presentation slides are in 4:3, or another format, then your slides will likely be scaled down to fit the projector image. This can make text on your slides harder to read. If possible, change the format of your slide deck to 16:9, make sure it still looks good and re-upload.
- Slides contain non-standard fonts that aren’t embedded: Preseria scans PowerPoints for unusual fonts that aren’t embedded. When using these types of fonts you might risk that they will appear differently on the presentation laptop that’s used during the live event. Either replace the fonts with a common type or embed them into the PowerPoint.
- Video starts on mouse click: Usually you will walk around on a stage with a clicker in hand when giving your presentation. Most clickers only lets you go back and forth. If your PowerPoint contains videos that needs to be clicked on with a mouse to start then you’re either dependent on having easy access to the mouse cursor or having to give a cue to the technician. This is tedious and we recommend you instead make your videos either start “In Click Sequence” or “Automatically” instead of “When Clicked On”.
Critical issues:
- Broken media links: Earlier versions of Office PowerPoint did not embed media by default, but instead created a link to somewhere on the authors hard-drive. When a PowerPoint with a broken link to a video is played back on another machine, that video will load. Fix this by removing broken links and embedding the media files into the PowerPoint. Then re-upload your file.
Installing & Using the Desktop App
The Preseria desktop app lets you browse the event’s sessions and download the uploaded presentations for each session to your hard drive for offline storage. When you are logged in and online it also regularly checks for updates and notifies you (without disturbing any currently running presentations) that there are updated presentation files available. Additionally, it has two modes; Technician Mode and Presenter Mode.
Technician Mode
When launching files from the Technician Mode, the file will be opened in the default application associated with the presentation file type. For example will .key files usually be opened in Apple Keynote on a Mac, but you will have to start the slide show by yourself.
Presenter Mode
When launching files from the Presenter Mode, the Preseria desktop app will automatically close and fade out any running presentation file and then open the next file in full screen mode on the projector/audience screen, ensuring seamless switches between presenters and their presentation material.
If you are planning to use the Preseria desktop app for displaying presentation files and seamlessly switch between presenters (Presenter Mode) then you need to install the software listed below (note that this mode is only available on Windows). If you only plan on using the desktop app for downloading and syncing files, then no other software is required (Technician mode).
Software required for Presenter Mode on Windows PCs:
- Microsoft Office PowerPoint (2019/365 recommended)
- Adobe Acrobat Reader DC (https://get.adobe.com/reader/)
Additionally we recommend you follow event production best practices and use a “clean” laptop with a freshly installed version of Windows. Make sure it’s updated with the latest security patches (run Windows Update) and then consider disabling automatic updates before the event starts. Also consider disabling unnecessary apps from auto-starting on boot and any regular scheduled background tasks that might interrupt a presentation or slow down the computer.
When presenting PowerPoints, Microsoft Office automatically supresses notifications from the operating system, but that does not necessarily happen automatically when displaying PDFs or stand-alone video files.
No special hardware requirements are needed to run the Preseria desktop app, but a modern laptop is recommended to be sure that slide transitions, animations and high-resolution videos run smoothly. In other words; it depends on your content.
To be able to run the desktop app in Presenter Mode, you need a Windows laptop and a secondary display (projector or screen). The Presenter Mode will not run without having two displays configured in “Extended Desktop Mode” in the Windows display settings.
You can find links to the macOS and Windows versions of the desktop app in the desktop app installation guide.
Note: Currently only the Windows version supports Presenter Mode. The macOS version is limited to displaying the session schedules and downloading & syncing files.
The Windows version supports two modes: Presenter Mode and Technician Mode. On macOS only the Technician Mode is available.
You can read more about the two modes in the documentation:
Ideally you would have all the presentation files downloaded to the presentation laptops in the different rooms before the event starts, but we all know that’s not how it works in real life. Last minute changes will be requested by presenters, and slides might have been re-uploaded from a Speaker Ready Room.
Our general recommendation is that you should only trigger the downloading of updated files during breaks. Downloading may take a while, depending on your network and the size of updated files, and you shouldn’t do anything that could potentially disturb the flow of the current presenter. Also, starting a download will close the currently running presentation and display your chosen background image for your current session.
Short version: Click the “Update Available” button during a break and when you know you have plenty of time to download the updated files.