Hi Derek, A great question... Here is my $0.02 CAD worth! Ready for a soapbox statement!!! 8-)
In our context, I see the use of collaboration tools growing in the computational sciences (and in research in general). The grid computing consortia in Canada just went through a round of funding (successfully I might add - see www.westgrid.ca for the announcement) that will provide approximately $180M in funding (federal, provincial, and matching money) for research computing across Canada. From a Canadian context, this is very significant! Collaboration is a part of this funding and we will be looking at expanding the collaboration capability across Canada. You will note above that I don't mention AccessGrid explicitly, and I do this on purpose. My personal opinion is that we are building a collaboration infrastructure here, not an AccessGrid infrastructure. The main reason for this position is that I don't believe you can force the tools on the user. Thus we build **collaboration rooms** that are AccessGrid capable (that is, they support multiple cameras, multiple screens, good quality audio, etc.) but they support other software/hardware platforms as well. Many (most) of our rooms can be multi purposed to do AG, H323, VRVS, Skype, iChat, etc so that the appropriate tools are available to the users. It is next to impossible to force a collaboration tool on a community, especially when they are already using something else... Try getting the High Energy Particle Physics people to change what they use as a collaboration tool and you will see what I mean 8-) Again, personally, I believe that the AG environment provides the most flexibility as a toolkit for collaboration. It is extensible and open, and therefore allows you to do interesting integrated things like sharing desktops, visualization, and high def video. Its multi-camera, multi-screen capabilities were until recently pretty unique! If you look at what is now happening in industry, they are pretty rapidly starting to catch up. First of course, we have INSORS which sells commercialized AG-like systems. http://www.insors.com/ Many H323 vendors are now doing HD video. http://www.polycom.com/solutions/1,1694,pw-17155,00.html?trackID=17155&track=pwHome Some vendors are starting to make multi-screen multi-camera HD products. http://www.hp.com/halo/index.html http://www.cisco.com/en/US/netsol/ns669/networking_solutions_solution_segment_home.html Does these last systems remind you of anything??? 8-) Things are changing rapidly in industry in this area! In my opinion, the disuse over time syndrome results from at least two factors: 1) a lack of support for the technology and 2) a lack of time for our users to adapt. By 1), I mean that room based systems, no matter what type (AG, H323, Halo), take some level of support. If they are not supported then users have bad experiences and they don't come back and use them. The rooms get out of date, and no longer work when people want to use them. My experience is that it is VERY difficult to find funding to make this work over an extended period of time. In my opinion, you need an extended period of time (see 2 below) By 2), I mean that once users adapt and learn about the technologies, they can use them without a lot of support (so 1 above isn't the end of the world). If the systems (and the rooms) are designed well, then after some learning and experience users can operate the systems themselves. This is easier with H323 than AG, but it can happen for both... After being operational for a number of years here in our facility at IRMACS/WestGrid/SFU, we have users that regularly book collaborative meetings and we, as the technical support staff, often don't know much about them. Yes, we still support many of these meetings, but many just run themselves. This is more true of the commodity technologies like H323, Skype, etc (as they are simpler) but it does happen on the AG side as well. My last comment would be that it is absolutely critical to support desktop level collaboration into this environment seamlessly. One can't expect people to walk to a room every time they want to collaborate with a colleague. Room to room collaboration should be used for very specific purposes where it is required, but one needs to support person to person and person to room collaboration. Note that the big guns are looking at this pretty seriously as well. The HP Halo system is a room to room system. Nice, but not terribly useful if someone doesn't happen to have a supper high end HALO room handy. HP has recently formed an alliance with Tandberg (one of the big H323 vendors) to link the HALO world (which is a proprietary system) to the H323 world. As you can see from the article below, its not clear what this means, but they clearly think this is important... http://www.wainhouse.com/files/wrb-08/wrb-0801.pdf Bottom line is it looks to me like the domain is growing, the question is maybe can AG stay ahead of the curve given how fast the industry folks are moving!!! Soapbox - off Cheers, Brian Derek Piper wrote: > > Hi all, > > I've been part of the AG community for a while now, nearly 3 years > and over that time I've not seen a lot of growth in the number of sites > that we interface with for AccessGrid meetings. Quite oppositely I have > seen sites that were good AG participants fall into 'disrepair' through > lack of funding and site expertise. > A bit of a devil's advocate question, but is AccessGrid usage > declining? Is AccessGrid on the way out? I've seen people turn to things > such as Polycom for meetings rather than have AccessGrid meetings. > I'm curious to learn of other points of view on this. > > Derek >
