Broadcasting PowerPoint Presentations over the Network

Maintaining Presentation Broadcasting

A presentation broadcast on your network requires minimal ongoing maintenance. Two maintenance issues to consider are removing unnecessary files from shared broadcast folders and keeping client computer clocks synchronized with NetShow servers.

Cleaning up broadcast folders

Most Microsoft PowerPoint presentation files and streamed presentation broadcasts take a large amount of disk space. You can monitor the space these files use in the shared locations for broadcasts and archiving; and you can restrict broadcast file locations to a set of default folders so that you know which servers and folders to monitor.

For archive folders, ensure that ample disk space is available for users to archive broadcasts. Use the following usage rates to estimate the amount of disk space that users need.

For example, a half-hour broadcast with audio and video takes about 22 megabytes (MB) of disk space.

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Keeping client clocks synchronized with the server

The presentation broadcast lobby page has a remaining-time display that relies on the client system clock and on the scheduled start time of the broadcast. If the client system clock is not synchronized with the server clock, the remaining-time display on the lobby page is not accurate.

Typically, system clocks across a network vary by plus or minus five minutes. This error range can cause a discrepancy of up to ten minutes between a server and clients. If you do not have a solution in place to synchronize system clocks across your network, consider using the net time command in user logon scripts — to synchronize the server clock with client clocks when users log on.