[AG-TECH] Fading AG usage?

[Brian Corrie]

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
>