Pankaj Kumar's Weblog

Last week something weird happened while I was making an internal (to my company) presentation over tele conference and MS NetMeeting to a worldwide audience of more than 25 people -- more than half of the participants couldn't connect to the NetMeeting session. Luckily, I had prepared detailed slides and was able to send the slides in time, mitigating some of the ill effects of the NetMeeting failure.

Lateron, while investigating the reason for this failure, I learnt that those who tried to join the online session kept getting "Request Refused" response. This was puzzling as I was hosting the conference, for I had noticed that if no one is hosting then the requests go to the first caller (and hence losing the control and be dependent upon someone who may not prepared), and had checked "automatic acceptance".

Someone pointed out that there is a limit on how many participants can join a NetMeeting session. Having been part of many NetMeeting sessions with long list of callers, I had always believed that this limit is quite high, but then came across this Microsoft knowledge article stating that that NetMeeting allows only upto 16 participants to call a single single Windows XP client. Note that this limit is on no. of callers to a single client and not on the total number of participants in a session. By "hosting the session" I effectively disallowed other participants to accept the "joining requests", and unknowingly limited the size of the conference.

In retrospect, what I found most annoying was the fact that I, the host, got no message from NetMeeting about all these requests that were being denied.

One more instance where the software didn't fail gracefully!