NSW RealTimeComms Roadshow 2008

AARNet are organising a one day Real Time Communications Workshop at the University of Sydney, in Sydney on the 23rd September 2008.

Summary of the Real Time Comms road show in Sydney can be find on AARNet Blog .

The Road Show will provide attendees with:

• a chance to engage with AARNet staff;
• information on current Video Conferencing/Streaming, IM, presence technologies and;
• a opportunity to influence AARNet's direction in the delivery of new applications and services

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Keynote speakers

Keynote 1 - Increasing connectivity across a decentralised office environment, Queensland University of Technology: A Case Study - Graham Keys, QUT

Abstract: The Queensland University of Technology (QUT) began its Unified Communications journey around four (4) years ago. This journey was in response to a growing call for the University to provide staff and students with a range of tools to support collaboration and resulted in the formation of a project to take the University forward.

QUT is a diverse environment with physical locations covering 4 main campuses with a number of remote office locations spanning a geographical distance of up to 50 kilometres. In addition the University has a diverse population with students and staff working and studying across main functional activities of Teaching and Learning, Research and Administration. Administration activities tend to be clustered around the standard working week of Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm. However, academic staff and students have a much more varied timeframe around Teaching and Learning, and Research which can effectively be 7 x 24 with the added complexity of research collaborations that can engage partners from around the world.

As we began the project to identify and implement an Integrated Collaboration Environment for the University it became quickly apparent that there was a widely varying interpretation of what the term “collaboration” meant. To help the University moved to a common understanding, measure our current infrastructure readiness and prepare a brief strategy paper on the way forward the project engaged Gartner to undertake the work. The Gartner report recommended five (5) major projects to move the University towards our goal of an integrated collaborative environment. The projects are:

• Design Process Models for Collaborative Work
• Contribute to planned Provisioning Project
• Plan, Design and Deploy Enterprise Repositories
• Plan, Design and Deploy Collaboration Client
• Plan, Design and Deploy Unified Messaging Platform

As the University sought to implement these projects a number of challenges emerged and these were put in the context of People, Process and Technology. From a technology perspective a number of components of our infrastructure need to be either replaced, modified or procured to move to an environment that facilitated unified communications. In terms of Process the University needs to work through changes to its business processes and information management systems that can better support a mobile and remote workforce. It was also apparent that changes were needed to policies, procedures, work practices, training and support for staff and students to equipment them with the skills and environment that facilitated decentralised and remote work practices.

The potential for Unified Communications to mitigate against the individual and group productivity losses through traditional ways of communicating can be difficult to measure in accurate and meaningful ways. The greatest barriers to gaining benefits come from people and culture, and these can be individual, group and enterprise.

From the project's perspective, it is more about improving delivery of information from remote sites to the centre. The real challenge is in identifying and quantifying the potential and realisable savings and benefits from the people perspective. QUT is examining how unified communications can support mobility and collaboration tools that facilitate better ROI on its staff investment and the intangible gains of better informed decisions, instant collaboration, higher levels of innovation, preparing for the next generation workforce, and skilling up a workforce for 2010 and beyond.

In early 2007 QUT and Griffith University began a joint project, the Mobile Staff Productivity Project. The purpose of the project was to develop qualitative data with respect to:

1. Staff attitudes to wireless mobility.
2. Staff use of mobile devices for higher workplace productivity.
3. Perceived advantages and disadvantages regarding the actual use of such technologies.
4. Reported inhibitors for increased adoption of workplace mobility using wireless applications.

An ancillary aim of the project was to provide some insight into the people, process and technology issues underpinning the adoption of mobile work at both universities. A number of recommendations have been identified from the study in 2007. Finally, during 2008 the project is developing a tool to gather data that can be analysed to quantify workplace productivity with a view to building the information into the cost benefit analysis for mobile workplace solutions.

Keynote 2 - Access Grid for the Optiportal - Chris Willing (QCIF)

Abstract: Room based Access Grid nodes were examples of some of the earliest uses of tiled displays, typically three projected tiles and an operator console - all driven from a single machine. However, what happens if a lot more than 4 video outputs are needed?

There is eventually a limit to the number of video outputs available from a single machine. To overcome this limitation, graphics clustering combines the video outputs from multiple machines to form a single multi-tile display.

An implementation utilising graphics clustering for building an Access Grid nodes was built in 2005, using a technology known as Distributed Multihead X (DMX) for the graphics clustering. While effective in that scenario, DMX does not scale well beyond 16 tiles. With the 20 tiles we're using in the OptIPortal display at UQVislab, we use other clustering techniques such as SAGE (from EVL) and CGLX (from Calit2). Currently neither of these operating modes easily allows interactive or multi-window applications such as the Access Grid to be run. The ability to also run the AccessGrid toolkit on the display itself, perhaps utilizing high definition video streams, would greatly enhance the collaborative potential of OptIPortals.

This talk will introduce the concepts of graphics clustering, as applied to OptIPortals, and summarise our efforts to integrate the Assess Grid toolkit into these large format displays.

Who should attend?

• Audio Video staff;
• IT staff responsible for managing video conferences and/or streaming/recording of lectures;
• Network Managers;
  
• IT Directors.

Location

Darlington Conference Centre
City Road, University of Sydney, NSW 2006

• How to get to the campus
  
• Centre Map
  

Important

Please contact realtimecomms@aarnet.edu.au with any further questions about this even