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

[Jennifer Teig von Hoffman]

Andrew,

This sounds like an incredibly useful application!

I've just installed it on a Personal Node and don't seem to have had any 
difficulties. I haven't had a chance to actually use it yet, but am 
looking forward to giving it a test drive.

- Jennifer

Andrew Patrick wrote:
> 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
>