TechTalks Transcript
Web Conferencing Tools and Applications: Are they Ready for Us?
October 24, 2002
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 Judith Boettcher [JB] |
 Howard Strauss [HS] |
 Stephanie Franks-Downs [SF] |
 Mary Trauner [MT] |
JB: Welcome to the CREN Tech Talk Series for fall of 2002 and to this session on Web Conferencing Tools�Are They Ready For Us? You are here because it�s time to discuss the core technologies for your future campus. This is Judith Boettcher, your CREN host for today and our session is coming to you with the support of the CREN member institutions and Linktivity, a division of SpartaCom Technologies, makers of Web Demo and Web Interactive, both of which are web-based real time conferencing collaboration and support tools. Let me welcome Howard Strauss today, our technology anchor, who is going to really take over partially for me since my voice is so crazy today. Welcome, Howard.
HS: Okay, don�t blame me, Judith! I know you thought that�s the kind of thing I would do to you, but—�
JB: All right!
HS: Thank you. I�m Howard Strauss, the technology anchor for the Tech Talk series of technology webcasts. Today we�ll engage our guest experts, Mary Trauner and Stephanie Franks, in a lively technical dialogue that will answer your questions about web conferencing tools and applications and we�ll ask those very important follow-up questions. You can join in this dialogue by sending your questions via e-mail to expert@cren.net anytime during this webcast. If we don�t get to your questions during the webcast, we�ll provide an answer in the webcast archives. Teleportation. At first blush, this is the ideal way to bring humans together to collaborate. No more security checks at airports, no more awful airline food, no more Saturday night stay-overs and no more breaking the travel budget with high airfares, rental cars and hotel bills. Instead of flying 6,500 people to EDUCAUSE 2002 in Atlanta, we could have all been teleported there and teleported back home to our families each night. Of course, our universities may not have allowed us to be teleported to Pittypat�s Porch for dinner. Instead, they probably would have teleported us some Student Center food to eat while we collaborated. Collaborating, however, would not be very effective if I didn�t have my network-connected computer with me, which I�d really need to share with everyone I was collaborating with. And it would really be nice to have some software to be a timekeeper in our meetings. No one wants to tell some important person that he or she has gone way past their time on the agenda and really needs to let someone else talk. It would be better if some computer did that. No one wants to be a scribe, either. It would be nice to have software that takes notes and after the meeting, distributes them with screen shots and videos of the attendees. Just moving the 1028 or so atoms in one human being in close proximity to another human is not necessarily necessary and certainly not sufficient for good collaboration. Some collaborations are best done over the phone or with simple software tools. I don�t want everyone trying to arrange a meeting with me teleporting themselves into my office or my home when they could just check my electronic calendar or phone me. Many face-to-face meetings are less successful than they might be because all of us can�t work on the same spreadsheet together or edit the same document together or prototype an application or tool together. When we have to leave the meeting and return to our own offices and labs to do these things, it makes collaboration much slower and much more difficult. We do not have teleportation today and most scientists are skeptical of it even being possible. What we do have instead are a growing number of increasingly sophisticated tools that enable us to do collaboration over the Internet. Even if we had teleportation, we�d still need the functions that these tools provide. Of course, the tools are far from perfect today but the people using them now are providing critical feedback to their developers and the tools are getting much easier to use and much cheaper. None of these tools approach the reality of teleportation, but they all allow us to avoid the hassles of flying somewhere on business and many have functionality that make them more effective for some applications that just beaming us up to some distant conference room. Mary, Stephanie, Judith and I are using a simple phone bridge for collaboration right now and all of you listening to the live webcast using the Internet can join the collaboration via e-mail. Judith and I think that these tools are just right for this webcast but we�ll hear what Mary and Stephanie have to say about this and about other web conferencing tools and applications on today�s webcast of Tech Talk. Judith?
JB: Well, thank you, Howard and you know, I didn�t expect�you keep surprising me. I didn�t expect you to bring up teleportation today.
HS: Well, that�s the main topic of what I was talking about, though!
JB: Right! In terms of how we collaborate, I find that one of the topics we�re going to be talking about today is just what to call some of these tools since we�ve got--you know, even the title of our conference today, when we came up with �web conferencing,� we talked about that for a bit in terms of what exactly is that. And if you will recall, when we did the Tech Talk on e-Books, we started talking about what is a book? So in many respected, you know��
HS: And what is �is�? No.
JB: Right, there we go. [inaudible]. So we will be talking a little bit today about just what is a web conference and what are some of the differences between the tools that we do have with us? With that, let me welcome our first guest for today. I�m pleased to introduce Stephanie Franks-Downs from ConferZone.com. Stephanie is the founder of ConferZone, which is a company that provides comprehensive and very importantly objective content on e-conferencing services and products. Welcome, Stephanie.
SF: Hi, Judith, thank you for having me today.
JB: Okay, great, and then our second guest for today is Mary Trauner from Georgia Tech. Mary is a senior research scientist in the office of Information Technology and Manager of High Performance Computing. Mary is also a founding member of ViDe, which is a collaboration group that I�m sure Mary will mention a little bit more for us today. Mary�s work in digital video has been primarily for application sharing and data collaboration that supports scientific and engineering applications among scientists. Welcome to Tech Talks, Mary.
MT: Hello. Thank you.
HS: Stephanie, we were talking a little bit earlier. You made this distinction between e-conferences and web conferences. Could you tell us about e-conferences and web conferences, what they are, how they fit together?
SF: Sure, no problem. The way that ConferZone sees the virtual event world is we�ve broken it
HS: The virtual event world!
SF: Yes, that�s another. There�s lots of different terms going out there.
JB: Another term!
SF: Boy, you name it! Virtual events, webcasts, webinars, fiber conferences, virtual trade shows. There�s all kinds of different categories out there. And about two years ago, when I started the company, we stepped back and spent quite a bit of time doing research, looking at all the different terminology that was out there and what we felt some of the best terms were to encompass everything. And what we call the industry as a whole is e-conferencing. And then within that, we�ve broken out into four categories of technology, the first being�well, I�ll read the four off real quickly. Audioconferencing, videoconferencing, collaborative conferencing and web conferencing. What we�re doing today is really an audioconference, kind of on steroids.
HS: It�s not collaborative?
SF: No, I would�the thing about collaborative conferencing, when we looked at that category�because really, when you think about it, any type of an e-conference is a collaborative conference. So it�s a little hard, but there are particular technologies out there that are meant to bring groups together to work together very interactively, where for example, there�s collaborative technology�I could actually, for example, I have up on my monitor here an Excel document that I�ve been working on. If I wanted to, Howard, if we were using a collaborative tool out on the Internet, I could actually give you control to work on my computer. And you would not even have to have Excel or you wouldn�t have to have that document. You could be working off of it on my computer and saving it onto my hard drive. So that�s a highly collaborative exercise. Those types of tools are used a lot if people have to do product demonstrations or training. So what we�re doing today, yes, it�s collaborative the way that Outlook calendars are collaborative, but to us, there�s a collaborative conferencing tool category. So what we�re doing today I would really put into the audioconferencing category and certainly audioconferencing has been around for some time but we�re really starting to see it get souped up. It�s going to more voice over IP, adding a lot of features and functions like polling over the audio and so forth. Videoconferencing is what we�ve traditionally seen. Videoconferencing made its appearance many years ago but never really took off and now we�re starting to see it come back around because the technology is getting much cheaper and also it�s being able�the broadcast is being able to go through Internet instead of having to go through expensive bandwidth lines like ISDN. And then the collaborative conferencing we just talked about and then the final one, which is really the most popular one. I shouldn�t say that. Audioconferencing still by far has the biggest segment of the market because it�s just something people do every day. It�s just a common practice. But web conferencing is definitely the hottest area as far as the newest trend that�s growing. That�s where the PlaceWares and WebEx and Rain Dance. You guys have probably heard of a lot of those companies. That�s where you have a PowerPoint presentation, maybe you have a video feed coming through. People can do polling online, they can whiteboard and draw diagrams for one another. You can chat back and forth. So those are really very popular tools that are coming up.
HS: Okay! Mary, you�re down in Georgia Tech where there�s lots of engineers and scientists and folks. How are folks down in Georgia Tech using web conferencing?
MT: Well, actually, I don�t believe there has been much adopted here. We have, I think, probably a different view on our needs for collaborative technologies. Now, I�ve been hanging around with people who are building directories these days and I think one way of looking at it is the community that you belong to or, in fact, how many communities you may belong to. From an academic environment, you�ll have your local [inaudible] group, you�ll have the institute, you�ll have outside projects, nationwide projects perhaps sponsored through government agencies and you might have a teaching side as well. So I think knowing or looking at these different communities and deciding which tools do I need for the different communities is really sort of a holdup right now. And how do we decide, especially when each different community may decide they prefer different tools or have different needs and need to look at different tools? Is there one tool that can do it all? And will each different community be purchasing that same tool? And so I�m really not seeing a lot of use of these collaborative technologies here. We�re seeing a little more use of the IP videoconferencing but in terms of the purchasing of these collaborative technology packages, there�s not too much yet.
JB: It sounds as if, since it�s a field in which there�s just a great deal, a great many different choices and a lot of different products evolving, your point about if you�re in�if I�m a member of ten different groups, am I going to have to have ten different collaborative tools is really a good point. Do we see anything that�s getting particularly popular, any type of tool that�s particularly popular, Stephanie, from your vantage point?
SF: Yes, I mean, it�s really interesting to watch the industry. Currently, one of the issues is that there�s just way too many players. Years ago, during the dot-com phase, definitely everyone saw this as a great opportunity and lots of people and lots of VC went into it. But we�re slowly but surely seeing them start to disappear or swallow one another up. WebEx has by far the largest portion of the market and they have a very strong web conferencing tool and a strong collaboration tool. And then of course, they�ve partnered for things like the audioconferencing component. So I think they�re a big player, if people know WebEx, chance are a lot of their colleagues are going to be using that. Also PlaceWare is a big one, Rain Dance, Mshow. My prediction is what�s going to end up happening is there�s going to be�it�s going to boil down to some key players, the same way we�ve seen things happen with MCI and AT&T, you know, the regular telcos who are also getting into this. But for the most part, they resell technology such as WebEx and PlaceWare. I think we�ll see it boil down to some key players, but you�ll still always have those small niches out there that do some really interesting things.
HS: But Stephanie, it seems like there�s�I mean, there�s lot of ways to divide things, but one way to divide things is that some of these products really just use the web. You don�t need any kind of client or any kind of special software installed in your machine, and a lot of others require that you have something, some client on your machine.
SF: Right.
HS: Do you see one of these things as being better of one of these kind of things winning?
SF: What I�m seeing, actually, I mean, there was a point a couple years ago where you always had to download an executable, you had to install it on your hard drive, you had to run it. It was very complicated. What I�m really seeing is�and then, of course, there was the flip side where you could go out to a website and just log in. But those were very basic. Those tools provided very basic technology. Maybe you could see a PowerPoint, you could chat in some questions, but they couldn�t necessarily chat back to you. It was very simple feature-function. Where I�m really seeing it all going is kind of coming together as a compromise in the middle. For example, when you join�as I�ve talked about�WebEx, you are actually getting a download, a Java applet onto your hard drive, onto your client, but you can�t necessarily tell that. It�s a little bit transparent to you because they�ve really learned ways to compress these technologies and to package them in such a way that it�s a little bit seamless for the end user.
HS: But I�m not talking about a Java applet, I�m talking about something like, say, Net Meeting or something like that. I mean, that�s not something that just uses the web, it�s not just a Java applet. You go up and buy this package and install it on your computer.
SF: Oh, I see what you mean. Oh, no, I think the most popular is going to be ASP based models, where someone else is having and supporting that technology.
HS: ASP meaning active server page.
SF: No, application service provider.
HS: You mean application service provider�okay.
SF: Yeah, I think today�s audience will probably know that terminology. ASP is a software provider where you pay for a monthly fee or you rent it by the minute or something like that. It�s not something that people have to have in-house. There are providers out there that will sell their technology and you can install it and maintain it in-house but for the most part, I�ve found that people don�t really want to deal with that. They�d rather just rent it.
JB: Are you finding a difference there in terms of whether they�re small businesses or large businesses, Stephanie? I mean, I would expect actually that the larger businesses that would have a great deal of use for this would like something that they could actually buy and install and host themselves.
SF: Initially, I saw it a lot with smaller or even middle-sized companies that were doing it. A lot of high tech firms were the first to do this because they�re always looking for a new cutting edge thing to be doing. So I saw that they�re the strongest, but there actually is a quote that I use often in my presentations from a Forester Research report, that 70% of the Fortune 1000 companies will have adopted some form of, say, web conferencing, e-conferencing technology by the end of this year. So it definitely has grabbed the attention of the big players. And there are certain factors that have happened in the last year, such as safety concerns and budget constraints that are taking what was already a hot industry and have really catapulted it up.
HS: Mary, is that your experience, that people are paying for these things monthly rather than going out and buying them?
MT: Well, one of the things that is of concern to me is the cost. I think that we�ll see real faculty reluctance to put the kind of fees that I�m seeing on the web pages and some of the articles that are written. I believe that faculty are going to be very reluctant to pay some of those fees. The cost to academia�now, there are often academic discounts and we could hope to see some of those. But I think that cost is a real issue here for widespread adoption in the academic environment.
HS: Are we just talking about the cost of the actual software or are we talking about the cost of using somebody�s server that the software is connected to?
MT: I think both. In most of these cases, it seems that you can buy per minute or pay a monthly subscription fee and I believe that in both cases, if you use this, say, several days a month, you have some fairly high costs. And I really believe that universities and individual faculty will have difficulty in paying these kind of fees.
HS: Do you have any idea what the costs are, Mary?
MT: From what I�m seeing, the per minute charges can go anywhere from about 40 cents up to close to 70 cents a minute. The subscription fees run around anywhere from $40 to $200, $250 a month. I�m not sure what the terms are when you subscribe. I�m not sure what the term would be on that, but I�m expecting something like a year. Stephanie may know more on that.
HS: Do you have some ideas about that, Stephanie?
SF: Sure. Some people do it per minute from an educational standpoint. I�m assuming from Mary�s perspective that you�re talking about taking physical classrooms and doing it online and such. You know, they�re going to have a much better economy of scale if they look at buying it per seat. Most of these technologies will let you buy a per-seat, where like for example, you could buy a room of 50 seats and you can use that ten times a day or however often you want to in a day for a whole year, or you could use it once a month or once a year. You just pay a per seat price and that�s going to definitely be the most economical for universities, I would think, if you can work out the coordination of who�s going to use those seats when. In my opinion, I work a lot with corporations and telecommunications, all types of more public type companies, so I mean, they�re normally in a situation where they have disparate teams. They want to reach people all over the world for marketing purposes and so forth. Whereas I think universities more often are in a situation where their audience and their students and such are more local and I�ve definitely seen it seems like from an academic standpoint, people are going a little bit more kicking and screaming into this. Especially we�ve seen a lot of that from Ivy League schools. I�ve read various articles about that. But actually, I spoke on an event this morning, an eLearning presentation this morning for a group out of Kansas City and something I read off to them, something we�d found in the news, that MBA students at three of the world�s leading graduate schools of business will share a virtual classroom this year. And one of the schools that�s involved is Berkeley. So it�s all starting to pick up, but I think it�s just a different sell on the universities� side than it�s going to be on a corporate side.
HS: Could we talk for just a minute about the applications that seem to be the most popular applications for universities? Mary, do you have any ideas about what universities are trying to do with this thing?
MT: Well, we are seeing a ramp-up of use of videoconferencing and pulling classes together from around the country to sort of share experiences, build teams and things like that. And for the most part, I think their follow-ups are via e-mail and in the classes, they�re mainly just sharing PowerPoint slides still, simple Net Meeting. In classes, I hear a lot of interest in things like Mimeo Boards and how they�re shared.
HS: What�s a Mimeo board? I�m sorry.
MT: It�s like a white board but it�s a physical board where an instructor can be building things and writing and lecturing, but it�s also transported to the other classrooms and it can be stored, as I understand it.
HS: So you�re talking about a kind of application where we can take classes or classrooms in different physical locations and sort of get them together as though they were all at the same location.
MT: Right.
HS: Just having a big distributed classroom.
MT: Right. And if you want to look at the classroom environment, then I think you�re sharing probably more still documents, more notes, more lecture type things. But taking that one step further, coming from an engineering school, it would be wonderful for an instructor to be able to teach engineering concepts through animations and MatLab and I have to date not seen any products that can keep up with the animations coming out of some of these [inaudible]. Also if you go into the meeting environment, between faculty, say, in an earthquake center, on global climate change, running models of this and being able to share and discuss the developments in these models while the graphics are rendering in real time. I have not seen tools that can do that. Those are the things that I�m interested in finding and seeing. Now again, it might make sense that these come after we find solid things that can do PowerPoint and show Word and Excel documents and support chat. But I think ultimately we need to see, for the academic environment, we need to see things that can do more real time rendering for both the classrooms and meetings.
HS: Stephanie, do you have any sense of what higher ed is using this kind of thing for? Or do you just agree, I mean, Mary said it�s being used to do kind of distributed classrooms. Stephanie?
JB: Stephanie?
HS: Have we lost Stephanie?
SF: I�m sorry, I had my phone on Mute so I didn�t realize�I apologize. Yes, I mean, I�m seeing it really on all levels. I mean, most people, I think, to start are trying simpler things, as Mary was saying, where they can push some PowerPoint, they can put up a white board and they can all draw together. They can do some quizzing, that�s a big thing, where you can do tests and quizzing online. Also seeing this to be very popular for on-demand training where you can record classes and different things, trainings that people need to go through and then put them in a library of classes and they can go out
HS: But that�s like a video server. I guess I don�t understand what that has to do with web conferencing.
SF: Well, how is it like a video server?
HS: Well, you�re saying you record all these classes and then you have just this big catalog of videos that you can look at.
SF: Oh, no, that�s not what I�m saying at all!
HS: Okay.
SF: It is, you record a web conference where you�ve got�for example, we could be recording this event today that we�re having��
HS: We are recording it.
SF: We could have PowerPoint slides and white boards and such and then have tests and things that happen at the end. So someone could come in, log in, listen to us talking, see us drawing, putting up PowerPoints and so forth and then they could at the end take the test and it can all be scored in the system and an instructor could go in and see, okay, this student�s completed these five courses. This student�s completed two. This is how they each scored. They can pull reportings and such.
JB: Howard, I think that that�s an interesting application. We�ve got some questions coming in, I think, from folks that we may want to take right now and also encourage other folks and remind them to send questions in to Stephanie and to Mary at expert@cren.net.
HS: Yeah, we have a question from Tyler Johnson at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And Tyler asks, �Don�t you think it is the case that the technology will never take hold as long as there are multiple proprietary solutions because that just promotes a tower of Babel phenomenon that Mary describes? Videoconferencing over IP didn�t take off until everyone agreed on the H.323. Are there standards around for web conferencing?� Mary?
MT: That�s an excellent question and that is my third concern is that while these are all coming through a very easily accessible medium, namely the web, they all have very unique architectures. Some are DTML, XML, Java, Java Script, PHP. Any mix of those architectures so that they are not at all interoperable. There are no standards that support this any more. And that is my main concern is that�and what ties into my issue of communities and if I�m in five different communities, does that mean I�m going to have to learn three different tools? And learn and buy or subscribe to three different tools in order to participate in those communities?
JB: So it would be a little bit equivalent to the fact that before we had the telephone system, that we would have to have four or five different headsets, right?
MT: Right, right. And TLT [?] 120 was very convenient as far as it could take us in that anyone that built according to the TLT [?] 120 standard, their product would interoperate with any other. And I had good success with testing some of those things. But again, it stopped short and even those who are looking at the standard feel that effort should be put into these web tools instead. And so at some point, my hope is that the vendors will work together, cooperate, to build some�maybe ad hoc at first�standard in how they build the different pieces so that they can interact.
JB: Stephanie, what about you? Do you see the top two or three competing standards in this area?
SF: I don�t really know what I would define as the top standards. But I think that my main opinion is that this technology is definitely here to stay, and like other technologies in other industries, it�s going to work itself out as we move forward here, especially as some of the big players like Microsoft is starting to get involved heavily in this industry. Also, as this all starts to go more mainstream with business to consumer. Now they�re starting to use this to put movies over the Internet, they�re doing Victoria�s Secret fashion shows through this over the internet and so on. So as it becomes more mainstream, I think the nature of the technology industry, they all start to come together. I think we�ve seen that with everything from Palm technology through cell phones and just all the different things that are out there. At one time, there were various different Word editing applications and so forth. Now everyone�s pretty much using Microsoft. I think these things kind of come together.
JB: It sounds like we�re just not quite there yet at this point.
HS: I wonder, do we really need standards? And the reason I�m asking that kind of strange question is it sounds like we�re doing a lot of different things. I mean, we already have a standard for audio. We�re doing an audioconference here. No one�s suggesting we change the way we talk on the phone except maybe voice over IP. We have H.323 for video. XML�s a fine standard for moving some things around. Where do we need a standard? We need a standard for what? Aren�t we just pulling together existing standards, Mary? Hello?
MT: Hello! No, we�re not pulling together existing standards.
HS: I mean, most of the things you mentioned were existing standards.
MT: Pardon me?
HS: Most of the things I thought you mentioned were existing standards, XML, this, that.
MT: Well, what I�m saying is, those are tools that can be used to build more tools on the web and when you architect your web tools with some subset of those, that doesn�t necessarily mean that they�re going to match with the subset used by another vendor. So as one set of tools might be using Java, another set might be using DTML and pure text, something like that, or PHP and SML. So that these are going to be very unique architectures, and in their own right, proprietary architectures.
HS: Okay, we have another question from Richard Danielson at Laurentian University up in Canada and Richard says, �Coming from a small institution, I am quite interested in really cheap packages. The best price is free.� Well, that�s true of every university! He asks, �What�s available in the open source world and how popular are open source web conferencing tools?� Stephanie, know anything about them?
SF: By open sources he means�he�s talking to more of a marketing person here�so by open sources does he mean free?
JB: He means really cheap. That was actually
HS: The title, the subject was �Really Cheap Stuff.��
SF: Right! Boy! I mean, the cheapest one that I�ve found, there�s a product called Rain Dance or a company called Rain Dance, excuse me, and they have a product, their Lite product. And it�s about the same cost as an audio call and you get the audio through them and you have your own virtual room out there. You have your own dial-in, you can do instant meetings at any time, load up presentations and so forth. It�s all web-based, extremely simple for people to join, extremely simple for people to learn how to use. So that�s probably, I would say, the cheapest one that I�ve seen out there with the ability to do something visually and audio at the same time.
JB: Can we talk about if somebody was going to get into this web conferencing at a simple level, what is it, what are the features that people start using this technology with, Stephanie? You mentioned��
SF: Sure.
JB: I�m sorry, go ahead.
SF: The basic ones are the ability to push PowerPoint, also the ability to do polling, where you want to be able to ask your group questions. So if you just went through something, then you could either do a little quiz or you could say, �What�s your opinion on this? How is your comfort level? Did this make sense?� And you could just do like a multiple choice question. And then everyone will instantly be able to see the results from a statistics standpoint, some type of a diagram as to how everyone answered. Also the ability to have chat back and forth. And there�s all different levels of that. Sometimes tools have the ability to let you just chat into the leader and they can chat back to you. Others have where you can chat amongst the other participants. The best tools, in my opinion, have the ability to let you turn on and off all those different features as you choose. Also the ability to do whiteboarding, I think, is going to be very important for educational, and that�s where you can turn the screen white and the presenter or the teacher can do some diagrams or draw things if necessary. Those are what I think would be the basic things for people to start out with.
JB: You know, one of the applications that I get asked a great deal are just tools for a group to meet, again, rather than having to travel. If I�ve got a small group or a committee and they might be actually located in the same state, but within, say, a two or three hundred mile area and they want to meet and there are anywhere from, like, five people to 20 people. Are the tools ready for this kind of real time meeting of that sort?
SF: Definitely. Most all of them can accommodate that. Again, what it comes down to is what�s the objective of the meeting? Are they meeting to train each other on how to put together a piece of equipment that has a hundred different parts? Are they
JB: I think it was more just a meeting, just a regular meeting, as opposed to training.
SF: Certainly, there�s all kinds. There�s ones where�for that purpose�they could just do an audio call like we�re doing today. I have clients that I�ve never met before that I do marketing consulting work for. I have one client I�ve been working with for two and a half years and I�ve met him once at the very beginning. Once you start to get used to doing the audio, it can be very effective. It�s just a new way of working, to get to [inaudible] so accustomed to always getting together. But if they need to have some visuals in front of them, like they were planning on having a projector and showing some slides, you can easily do that over the Internet. If they were going to work on a document together and sit there and evaluate and make changes together, again, they could easily do that over the Internet. So it just kind of depends on the complexity of what they want to accomplish in a meeting.
JB: Okay.
HS: Some of the things we�ve been talking about�in fact, most of the things we�ve been talking about sound to me like we get a bunch of people together in some room with special equipment and we talk to or we collaborate with some other people in a big room with special equipment. But what about me just sitting in front of my computer and having some kind of web conference with a bunch of other people, each of them just sitting in front of their own computer? I know that�s going on, but what�s the state of that now?
MT: Well, kind of to address that and even a little bit of the last question, I think that someone can really get started easily with just a whiteboard and chat program. That�s probably a really good place to start and practice and there are some free ones out there. Now, they don�t necessarily perform very well, but it�s a good place to start and practice and see if people are really motivated to move into the environment. But with these recent spam attacks, the Internet root server attacks and things like that, they are going to be more vulnerable. I think these higher end packages probably can survive those sorts of things better and I believe that that is part of why they do have the extra expense with them. But I believe that if you want to try them out, start somewhere, start with something cheap, there are some freeware whiteboard chat packages out there.
HS: What about me just sitting at my desk, I�m sitting at my computer and I want to have a videoconference with a few people here. Is that working okay now? I mean, can people do that?
SF: A videoconference?
HS: Yeah! I mean, I�ve done this from my desk to some big room. I have a little Polycom Via Video camera sitting here and I know I�ve been able to use it from here to some big room that has special equipment. And I wondered if people are doing that and if people are just getting together, rather than me going to some special place with some special hardware. I�d just like to sit at my desk with inexpensive hardware and be able to do this kind of thing.
SF: What I�m finding is that there�s technologies out there where you can either flop it out so that whoever�s talking, everyone can see them talking, or you can even do it if you�re going to have a smaller group, where maybe six video feeds are up there at once so everyone can see everyone. I�m not, at this point, finding that to be extremely popular. People seem more concerned about being able to get the audio and to see visually where there�s some form of content, like Mary was talking about the whiteboarding or something not so much having the need to see one another. But you definitely can do that.
HS: Let me put it another way. Is this to the point where it�s a desktop application or is it still just a classroom application?
MT: If you�re talking H.323 type of videoconferencing or multicast videoconferencing, yes, absolutely, it works quite well. I�m probably in two or three desktop videoconferencing meetings a week.
HS: Where you�re just sitting in your office?
MT: It�s very routine for me. Um-hum. And the clients are very, very cheap now and they work very well. You know, the multipoint conferencing adds the additional component in there to handle the multipoint, but point to point is very straightforward, very easy and less expensive than the web conferencing. But if you also want to supplement it with some document sharing, then you need to go that next step.
HS: So this is something, Mary, that a student could do in their dorm room. They could get a little camera and they could be doing this point to point videoconferencing with students down the hall or at the next university or something.
MT: Absolutely! Right.
HS: What�s the implications to a university if people start�instead of sending e-mail, they send video streams to each other.
MT: Well, some people have been looking at that and they�re really finding out that that bandwidth is minimal compared to, say, the music they�re downloading, movies that they�re downloading, things like that. That for videoconferencing, the bandwidth is reasonable and we�re nowhere reaching our capacity.
HS: So we�ve got to be more concerned about MP3 than videoconferencing?
MT: I think so.
JB: Except that, Mary, now you�re on an Internet 2 campus so you�ve got more bandwidth than the average campus. Is that fair to say?
MT: Right, yes. It is.
JB: Okay. We�ve got another question that came in. Actually, this person gets the prize for coming in the earliest. Howard, would you like to��
HS: Is that Don Williams?
JB: Yeah, Don Williams, right. I think maybe given that we�ve talked about some of the capabilities, where are we in terms of support?
HS: Yeah, Don Williams from University of Southern California�perfectly wonderful place to be today and Don, I�d be happy to visit right now!
JB: Yeah, it�s pretty cloudy where I am!
HS: And here. Don says, �Considering the increased interest in the use of this technology, there appears to be an extreme shortage of qualified support staff to take care of the hardware and firmware issues to support the current needs, much less the potential growth. Where do people get training to support all these tools?� Mary, how do people get trained down there, or what do they do?
MT: Well, that�s something that we�re�and ViDe, that�s something that we�re considering right now is when we can suggest some products to our constituencies, as you might call them, how will we follow up? And I think that for the most part, we�ll do the support and it becomes a training matter. And some of these tools are fairly complicated and the screens can get fairly busy when you�re packing in all these different pieces. So the training is the issue. If you subscribe to one of these services, then they�re, of course, going to be doing the server maintenance and software updates and all those sort of things. So I think it becomes more of a training issue. I�m not able to comment on the server support issue.
HS: Stephanie, what are you seeing with respect to people being able to deal with this technology? What kind of support do they need to do this web conferencing, e-conferencing kind of thing?
SF: You know, I might be�I don�t know how accurately I can answer that question from an education standpoint because as far as if you want to bring it in house, most of the people that I work with and talk to every day are not bringing this in house. They don�t need the support in house. They�re buying seats from ASP model vendors and just renting the software from them.
HS: But are those seats in their own buildings or are they going somewhere else to do this?
SF: Oh, they�re going somewhere else. It�s out on the vendor�s server so they just dial in. They have to have Internet access, they go to their location on that vendor�s server that they have rented to maintain and if they have any trouble they call the vendor�s support line and have 24/7 support from the vendor directly.
JB: But physically, they just stay in their own building?
SF: Oh, yeah.
JB: Right.
SF: I mean, you can do it from anywhere.
JB: Right.
HS: But they still will sit down in some conference room and dial out from there because they have cameras set up and things like that. They do have some of the infrastructure in their own building.
SF: If they�re doing videoconferencing, correct. But a lot of times you can rent that and then that comes with support. If they�re just doing web conferencing, that�s all just going to be software technology based. If you have a problem with your own physical computer, just as if you were using Microsoft Word and had trouble, yes, it�s going to be your in house support.
HS: Mary, this is going to sound like we�ve switched back a couple weeks, if you�ve been listening to Tech Talks, but it sounds like a lot of the stuff we�re talking about would fit in very nicely in the smart classroom. Do you know if people who are building smart classrooms are trying to build web conferencing into those facilities, or are these separate facilities?
MT: I believe the some are. I know there are several projects here at Georgia Tech�I�m sorry to say I�m not up on their status at this point�but they are definitely building these sorts of tools in, yes.
HS: Okay, we�ve said we�re sort of early in this technology. The technology has a long way to go. Stephanie, if you were looking at some future product, some ideal web conferencing thing, what kind of things would it do that we�re not doing today or that we�re doing today with some difficulty?
SF: Hmm! Well, I think what I�d like to start to see evolve more and more, I mean, the video is nice but�and this is a long way off�but is just more of the virtual reality teleportation�which you started the event out with�concept, where now they�re doing teleportation where you can project a person�s entire body into another room and they can walk around and they can see people raise their hands.
HS: That�s a hologram. Not real teleportation.
SF: Yeah.
HS: Just so we get truth in advertising here.
SF: Right, right. I should have said an image. So that type of thing, where we can all put on glasses and we can go into a virtual classroom together and we can sit down and interact. That�s, in my opinion, going to be the ideal world. That�s when this technology will have hit its high point. But we�re obviously many years from that.
JB: That�s going out, like you say, probably anywhere from five to 15 years, Stephanie. What would you say if a vendor came to you today and they said, �We�re going to build actually the ideal tool.� What do you think we need to see?
SF: What I think would be ideal is to have someone who has a technology that can go based on what you select from a functionality standpoint. You can work with one vendor to get a very light product when your attendees are going to be on low bandwidth and maybe they�re not completely technically enabled all the way up to very high end where you have video feeds and all the bells and whistles are there and you can just kind of turn those on and off as you choose. Because I work with a lot of people who sometimes want to do something very simple on this, sometimes they want to do something very advanced, and we have to look at different players for that. So that would be ideal in my mind.
MT: I think there are two things that come to my mind. One that you already see in some of these, but when we look at supporting a workgroup, we look at beyond just a meeting. We�re looking at a whole project and so the repositories, databases or repositories become important. The documents that support that project cannot live on anyone�s PC anymore. They have to be in a central place, they have to be tracked, they have to be secure, they have to be available to the whole group at any time. And I think those tools are going to be very important. And the other thing is that I�m not sure how long the server based technology�or if that�s the only technology that we�re going to see. I think that peer to peer may be in the future and that more and more our PDA�s and our cell phones are going to be coming into this environment as well and that they might be a little bit more direct connection for some of these things.
HS: Mary, what are some of the security issues here? It seems that we�re communicating in lots of different ways. If I�m trying to have a conference about information that�s confidential or proprietary, is that okay to do?
MT: Well, these tools really need to have a high level of security. Like, for example, SSL services. I saw where one of these tools actually charges you extra if you use the SSL interface and as far as I�m concerned, that just has to be part of the base product. So you need to have encryption and authentication, you have to have some form of lookup to know�theoretically, many of these people will never meet each other in person and you need verification that they are who they are. And that you are sharing your documents and your work and your livelihood with people that you know are who they say they are. So that�s very important. So tying in these directories is very important. And then you�ve got the spam attacks, the distributed denial of service attacks. These tools need to be resilient to those factors as well.
HS: Yes. Stephanie, you�re dealing with corporations. I would think that security is even more important for the people you deal with. What experience are you having with respect to security?
SF: Sure. Well, from what I�ve seen, the tools can be as secure or as not secure as you�d like them to be. Sometimes we do big marketing events where they really want anyone to be able to get on. Sometimes they do new product announcements where we try to weed out the competitors or people that we don�t necessarily want there all the way up to more kind of sensitive information where we want to make sure we have passwords that give the operator a roll call where everyone has to say that only certain people are allowed to join. What I always recommend to my clients is if you�re having a discussion on a topic such as your five year planning strategy, I don�t know at this point that I would recommend doing that over a virtual event. If it�s not something you�d send out over e-mail, you probably don�t want to be doing it over the Internet.
HS: Of course, e-mail is getting very secure now with digital certificates and things like that. One of the strange things I find, even here when we�re doing this kind of e-conference, is that you really have to develop different rules of etiquette to do this kind of thing. I mean, I can�t see you�and see, you don�t even know who I said when I said �you.� I can�t see Stephanie and I can�t see Mary and I can�t see Judith. And so it becomes more difficult to do this. Are people working out rules of etiquette or is it, �Oh, well, we�ll talk over top of each other.� How are people dealing with this kind of artificial environment? Stephanie?
SF: Sure! I think the key that I�ve found is that you need to have a really strong moderator. And also a strong plan. For example, if you�re going to do a big event, you need to have a setup conference before the event where all your speakers are together. You�ve got everyone muted, the operators are bringing everyone in, and then you open the speakers� lines but everyone else�s are muted. A lot of it�s just coordination and handling it appropriately and having a strong person who�s going to lead through the event. I�ve never seen any written etiquette document and I�ve done hundreds of events and everything seems to come out okay.
HS: It�s just that people are very resilient and they just adapt.
JB: Really adapt and they remember to turn their mutes on and off, right?
SF: Yeah, or the operator, depending on how safe or in control I guess you feel that your audience is going to be. Normally you can do an operator-assisted call. Today I don�t believe we have an operator, but you can have everyone�s lines muted, you can open certain lines. I would be on a communication line separately in the room with an operator saying �I need you to do this� or �I heard some feedback, can you check on that?� A lot of it�s just about having a good planner that�s coordinating the event.
JB: Well, actually, these comments link right into a question that we did get from Charles Kerns from Stanford who is actually going to be our expert next week. Or in two weeks. He wants to know about the importance of audio for videoconferencing rooms. Do you need to hire an acoustic engineer to plan changes for a videoconferencing room or can you just stick a Polycom box in the room? I�ll let either Mary or Stephanie pick up on this one.
MT: I can speak to that. It obviously depends on the size of the room. And when you say Polycom box, I assume he means a [inaudible] station. And a pod mike can support a small room with three or four people fine. But if you were talking some 20 people, then you�re going to want to bring in an engineer, yes, that would be my recommendation. I have seen people try to retro-fit a desktop unit into a conference room and it�s murder. You torture the people at the other end when you try to do things like that.
JB: Maybe it�s the modern equivalent of torture, right?
MT: Right. Audio is probably the most important in any of these tools. I would say probably audio is the most important, along with its mute button, the most important aspect and as long as people can hear each other well, they will suffer through some pixilations but they have got to be able to hear each other.
JB: Okay, Howard, I think we have one other question that came in for Mary from Thomas Every. Would you mind taking that one?
HS: Oh, sure. Mary, this is a question from Thomas Every at Cornell University and he said, �Mary, you talked about not finding high end collaboration tools for scientific purposes.� But Thomas knows of one! He says, �What about the Access Grid? Isn�t it designed for this? And what�s your opinion about it?��
MT: Okay, the Access Grid is a wonderful�more of a continuous virtual presence sort of facility. Requires multicast. Many people don�t have multicast. When it first came out, it had its own distributed PowerPoint and I believe that they have been adding some tools, but to put in an Access Grid node you need to set aside this special room for it. It does have some support requirements. It�s fairly costly, too. I think it�s there in the 45 to 50K range to set up one of these rooms. But I believe you can do some higher end collaboration through it. But there are some costs. They�re not going to be used by the average, everyday group.
JB: Okay, so again we�re talking about a fairly well-equipped campus, then, for that.
MT: Right.
JB: Okay, Howard, what about asking the practical implications question? I think we�re right about at time for that.
HS: The final question is this. You�re a university out there and the university would like to get started doing this kind of stuff. They haven�t done much of it or none at all. How do they get going? Where do they get started? Mary?
MT: Well, I guess kind of like I said before, a simple whiteboard and chat. Practice with some colleagues via a whiteboard/chat program, possibly in combination with one of the new little�ViaVideo or ViGO desktop units. And I think that really could give a person an idea of what this technology can bring to them.
HS: And where would they go to find out exactly how to do this? Are there some good sources?
JB: Cookbooks or recipes or getting started places?
MT: Hmm. Well, ViDe is putting together�our beta collaboration working group is putting together a website where we�re collecting information more for the academic environment. It�s very new, now. I think there�s a link to it on the CREN Tech Talks page now. I�m hoping, we�re sort of hoping that we get a lot of discussion groups going. There is a discussion group board in there for all these different tools and we hope to get more people active in the working group and contributing things. And so it would be a place that people can come and search and learn and participate in some discussions, ask questions and such.
JB: Okay.
HS: Stephanie, when a university went to you and said, �I want to get started in videoconferencing,� what would you tell them? Or web conferencing.
SF: Sure. First I�d recommend that they do their homework and really get out there and look around. A couple sites that they could look at, one is a site called eLearningguru.com is a really good one. Another one is Brandon-hall.com. These are a couple sites that really focus on e learning. And then of course, at ConferZone, our company, it�s a free resource for people who are wanting to get into e-conferencing and we have vendor listings and white papers on eLearning and even some of our past newsletters have specifically been on eLearning so that�s a place where they can get a lot of free information about getting started in this industry.
JB: Okay, that sounds just great. We�ll get those resources up on the web page for archiving and for follow-up purposes. Those will be great. Any other final question or comment, Howard, for us today?
HS: Yeah, I have lots and lots of questions but I believe we�re out of time. I wonder if there�s any final comments that Mary or Stephanie would like to make before we close this. Mary?
MT: I�m looking forward to a lot more activity from the academic environment and some of the next work that ViDe and Internet 2 will be doing will be exactly towards this next step, beyond videoconferencing and bringing in additional resources for collaboration.
HS: And Stephanie, you get the final word here.
SF: Sure! My only final word would be that it�s definitely something that�s coming, it�s something that hundreds of universities are all starting to pick up, so I would definitely recommend that everyone start to learn about it as much as they can.
JB: Okay, well, with that, let me thank our two experts for being with us here today and it does sound as if as far as answering that question about Web Conferencing Tools�Are They Ready For Us?�it looks as if we may want to come back and revisit this topic next year and see what has happened with the technologies and the services between now and then. So thank you so much, all, for being with us here today. Join us again in two weeks, on November 7th, and we�ll be talking with Charles Kerns from Stanford about a number of issues around eLearning portals, a hot topic on campuses today. Thanks very much to our CREN member institutions and Linktivity, makers of Web Demo and Web Interactive, the web-based real time conferencing, collaboration and support tools that we talked about today, for making this particular Tech Talk possible. Many thanks to our experts, Stephanie Franks and Mary Trauner; to our technology anchor, Howard Strauss; to Terry Calhoun, our Tech Talk web guru; to Jason Russell, Gayle Terkeurst and the support team at Merit network; to Susie Berneis, our audio file transcriber�remember you can pick these up in multiple formats including MP3 on our website�and finally, again, a thanks to all of you for being here. You were here because it�s time. Goodbye, Mary, Stephanie, Howard. To everyone.
HS: Thank you, this was great fun.
JB: See you all on November 7th. Bye, now.
MT: Bye.
HS: Bye.
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