[AG-TECH] announcing the Access Grid Venue Customizer (AVC)

[Andrew Patrick]

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.Patrick at 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.Patrick at 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