This use-case is not uncommon in Connect, particularly with an inter-company scenario.  The situation would be that there is a meeting in Connect and in one or more of the locations there are a number of attendees watching the presentation or training on a projected screen.  There is only one instance of Connect in this case and you want to know who is in the room at the session.

Clearly there is no way for Connect to know who is in the room so there is manual intervention, a ‘roll-call’.

You can achieve this easily using a new Chat Pod and adding this to your lobby layout.  Make the title of the pod something that will encourage the attendees to enter their names.  You can change the title of any pod by double-clicking on the title bar and entering new text (Figure 1 below).

Figure 1

As the names are entered you will see them.  You may want to include a second Chat Pod for general chat so that the attendance list does not get untidy (Figure 2).

Figure 2

Once you have decided that the roll-call is complete, or that anyone at this stage will not get a credit, you can email the pod text to yourself from the ‘Pod Options’ menu using ‘Email Chat History’ (Figure 3) and then turn-off/hide the pod.

Figure 3

The contents of the Chat Pod will not go away unless you clear the Chat Pod, but you might want to make sure other Hosts know you need this information.

Note – I have tried to reproduce this process using Adobe Presenter and the ‘Short Answer’ poll pod, but it always assumes only one answer from each meeting instance so although it is reporting correctly, you can only answer one time from each meeting instance so that does not work.  I am still trying to think of a way to use other tools like this.