Streaming Media - December 2007/January 2008 - (Page 30) machine and one or several other participants. Second, like many products and services under the collaborative computing umbrella, application sharing is also included in some of the products mentioned under desktop presentation software. Products such as WebEx—and even the old whiteboard-sharing-only products like NetMeeting—are primarily used as presentation platforms and not as collaborative computing vehicles. Other products, such as GatherPlace (which is produced by GatherWorks, the company founded by ex-White Pine/ex-FVC CTO Frik Strecker), take a more formal approach. Bordering on groupware, which we’ll discuss in the next section, GatherPlace combines instant messaging, real-time audio, recording capabilities, and desktop presentation tools with a central storage repository. Therefore the overlap between these types of tools is quite significant. laptops and desktops—video communications. The newer version of iChat, available via the Mac OS X Leopard operating system update, will also add iChat Theater (with desktop or application presentation functionality), plus the ability to mask out the background on video chats so that users can appear onscreen with a corporate logo or other backdrop, even if working from home. Add to this the additional integration of the .Mac service and its group folders via iDisk, and Apple’s not too far from a groupware solution. let’s work together Rich Media Recording Tools The last set of tools is the one most familiar to the Streaming Media audience. While these tools don’t quite measure up to the product categories already mentioned, they are the underlying rich media foundation for all the other collaborative tools we’ve looked at, and they are the tools with the greatest potential, when combined with other collaborative computing tools. One of the areas that has been most vexing in collaborative computing is the ability to share a full-motion desktop in real time; the bandwidth/timeliness trade-off has often resulted in 3–5fps at VGA or higher resolutions, or 10fps at video-only resolutions. The attempt to attain high-resolution screen captures while at the same time collaborating on rich media applications, such as video editing or graphic design programs, remains elusive, but hope is in sight. One reason that rich media recording tools, such as Accordent’s or Sonic Foundry’s products, have had limited success in reaching full-motion frame rate levels is technical; the other reason is business-driven. The technical issue is that still-image frame-grabbers are used to provide high-resolution captures of an attached laptop or desktop; the business issue is that the use of these products has been limited to basic lecture recording, with an occasional chat or poll thrown in. This limitation, building on the limitations of the original T.120 standard as a low-bandwidth collaborative technology, means that a large group of potential users, Groupware Even further down in the toolbox is a set of technologies that had been dubbed “groupware” in the past but that are now known by a variety of names, including instant messaging, content management systems, team applications, etc. These tools typically combine multiple modes of communication, as well as a central workflow repository. A recent example is Microsoft’s SharePoint Services, which provides centralized storage and access to particular collaborative tools in Microsoft’s 2003 and 2007 server products. A fairly well-thought-out, but still nascent and sporadically implemented example, is GoogleApps for Your Domain. Signing up for a Gmail account provides services similar to SharePoint, but at a very minimal—or even free—cost to small businesses and community groups. Starting from the iGoogle dashboard, which displays emails, group documents, shared calendar, and status of other users of Google Talk (Google’s instant messaging and VoIP client), a user can monitor pertinent high-level details of a project or group of documents. Where GoogleApps shines is in the ability to edit documents together using Google’s proprietary GoogleDocs services, but where it falls short is in the integration of video and cross-platform audio into the toolset, requiring out-of-band or offline communication during a collaborative process. GoogleApps is also limited in that it can’t show or share a user’s desktop—or any application other than the GoogleDocs—but this limitation could easily be rectified at any moment, in classic Google style. Even basic instant messaging clients are getting into the game. Apple’s iChat, a distant cousin to its QuickTime Conferencing from the DataBeam era, is primarily focused on text, audio, and— DimDim has introduced a free and open source web meeting service that includes two-way audio and video features for holding collaborative meetings. increasingly, thanks to the integration of cameras into many of Apple’s Macintosh 30 STREAMING MEDIA December 2007/January 2008
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