We are pleased to announce an initial alpha trial release of the Access Grid Venue Customizer (AVC).
AVC is a proof-of-concept shared application for customizing AG virtual venues. The premise is that different AG meetings organized to perform different tasks should not have the same services and parameters. Instead, some meetings may require extra services or different parameter settings. AVC allows meeting organizers to select from a set of common tasks (e.g., business meetings, collaborative work sessions, distance education, etc.) and then, when participants enter the venue and run AVC in "user" mode, the services and parameters are customized for the task. AVC managers are also able to create their own custom tasks. AVC is a Shared Application that is compatible with AG 2.3 installations where the Venue Client is running on a Windows machine (i.e., Windows PIGs or multi- machine nodes with a Windows display machine). AVC is currently not working with Linux Venue Clients. In this initial release, AVC is able to control the quality and bandwidth settings of VIC and RAT. AVC has been built, however, to be able to control a variety of AG services and shared applications, and this functionality will be added in future releases. Typical uses for this release of AVC are: - configure an important business meeting for the highest possible audio and video quality when all participants have high bandwidth - configure a distance education event where some students will have limited bandwidth to give relatively high priority to video (because of the visual materials being used in the lesson), and relatively low priority to audio - scale a meeting to take into account the minimum bandwidth available to the participants (e.g., someone is connecting from home) The software and installation instructions are available at http://iit130033.iit.nrc.ca/AVC/index.html Please give AVC a try and give us feedback about the software and the concepts. Thanks The AVC development team is: At the National Research Council of Canada, Ottawa Andrew Patrick Kenneth Emig Janice Singer Bruno Emond Khalil El Khatib Stephen Marsh Siraj Sabihuddin (student programmer) Changhua Wu (student programmer) At Simon Fraser University, Vancouver Brian Corrie Todd Zimmerman At the Communications Research Center, Ottawa Sylvie Noel For more information about AVC contact: andrew.patr...@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca -- Andrew Patrick, Ph.D. Senior Scientist Information Security Group, Institute for Information Technology National Research Council (NRC), Ottawa, Canada E-mail: andrew.patr...@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca WWW - NRC: http://iit-iti.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca WWW - Personal: http://www.andrewpatrick.ca Phone: (613) 991-3374 Fax: (613) 952-7151 Cell/SMS: (613) 277-9211
