Web conferencing

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Web conferencing

• Liane Tarouco

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Introduction

• The field of Web conferencing software is growing
  at a breathtaking pace. In the summer of 1994
  there were exactly two products in this category,
  both of them rather primitive freeware packages.
  Today there are well over 60 commercial and
  freeware products, many of them quite
  sophisticated, that support conferencing on the
  Web in one form or another

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Videoconferencing via web
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Web Touring and Co-browsing

• Web touring (also known as co-browsing or
  collaborative browsing) is the ability to drive
  multiple participants to access a sequence of
  selected Web pages simultaneously
• The presenter can synchronize all meeting
  participants to see exactly the same Web pages
  that they're accessing live on their computer.

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Web touring

• Web touring is implemented by way of broadcasting
  selected URLs to meeting participants and not by
  sharing the browser application.
• The latter entails repeatedly sending an updated
  image of the screen to all participants, which is
  both very bandwidth intensive and very slow.

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Features

• Push Web pages
• Follow-me / Sync-surfing
• Favorites / Bookmarks
• Preview
• Hand-over control
• Pre-caching
• Co-scrolling
• Co-filling
• Shared pointing tool
• History of URLs browsed

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Push Web pages

• Pushing a Web page allows the presenter to force
  a specific Web page to appear on the end user
  screen. Pushing Web pages is the very basic level
  at which co-browsing can be carried out. Some
  systems force a new browser window on each
  participant?s computer. The use of this feature
  theoretically leaves participants free to
  navigate and independently interact with the Web
  page received.

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Follow-me / Sync-surfing

• Provides a simple means for the
  presenter/moderator to navigate from link to link
  and from one Web page to another one while
  automatically "driving" all attendees. In this
  fashion all participants? browsers sync-up with
  whatever URL the presenter goes to. Systems
  missing this feature require the presenter to
• type and send out each specific Web page URL that
  needs to be accessed by the attendees.

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Favorites / Bookmarks

• The Favorites and Bookmarks feature allow the
  presenter/moderator to save and manage Web page
  URLs which need to be easily and rapidly accessed
  during a live session. In this way, the presenter
  needs not to type complex Web page URL "on the
  fly" and can be prepare ahead of time a list of
  Web page addresses that will need to be presented.

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Preview

• The co-browsing Preview feature allows the
  presenter/moderator to literally pre-view a Web
  page before broadcasting it to all of the meeting
  participants. This maybe very useful to check the
  availability of a page or the actual content
  being displayed before showing the page publicly.

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Hand-over control

• The Hand-over control feature allows the
  presenter/moderator in a co-browsing session to
  give control of the Web tour to any one of the
  participants in the session. This is very handy
  in events and presentations where multiple
  presenters need to take the stage. In most
  systems, presenters need to be assigned special
  passwords to access the moderator functions and a
  unique account must be created for them. The
  hand-over control feature simplifies this while
  providing the ability to easily hand-out without
  prior planning the co-browsing session control to
  anyone of the participants.

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Pre-caching

• The pre-caching feature allows the automatic and
  invisible pre-downloading of the Web pages to be
  viewed during a co-browsing session across all
  attendees. The content of the Web pages is
  downloaded during idle presentation times and is
  cached in the memory of each attendees computer.
  The operation takes place completely in the
  background, is completely transparent to the
  user, and can be optionally turned off by
  attendees. This approach allows very fast access
  to Web pages during a live presentation, and the
  ability to maintain greater synch with all
  attendees. This technical ability is presently
  not available in any web conferencing system
  available on the market and is one of the over
  100 new features that I have identified and
  described in this new series of upcoming Insider
  Reports.

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Co-scrolling

• Co-scrolling is probably the most sought after
  advanced feature by end users participating in a
  co-browsing session. As the name implies,
  co-scrolling provides the ability to scroll Web
  pages simultaneously with all meeting
  participants. When the presenter scrolls a Web
  page, it simultaneously scrolls on all
  participants? screens.

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Co-filling

• The co-filling feature originally pioneered by
  PageShare.com provides ability to fill out online
  forms, tests and other interactive documents in a
  collaborative synchronized fashion. The presenter
  can fill in fields of an online form live, and
  have the input appear on all attendees forms.
  Attendees can in turn fill in independently in
  their forms in the personal sections.

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Shared pointing tool

• A shared pointing tool allows the presenter to
  show the mouse cursor to participants in real
  time over the Web page being shown. This
  technique that is not presently adopted by none
  of the players in the market is a actually a
  combination of screen sharing and co-browsing.
  While this feature requires that all participants
  are forced to view the web page co-browsed in a
  window that is exactly the same size as the
  presenter, it does allow the presenter to show a
  light pointer (its appearance should be available
  in several formats laser pointer, arrow,
  blinking dot, hand pointing, mouse cursor, etc.)
  moving live over the web page content being
  displayed.

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History of URLs browsed

• The history of URLs browsed further facilitates
  the presenter task of going back to Web pages
  presented during the current or preceding
  sessions. The feature should allow the history to
  be shared and be accessed/downloaded by any of
  the meeting participants.

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Products

• Cuseeme
• VRVS
• Macromedia Breeze

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Cuseeme

• Cornel University
• CuSeeme
• White Pine
• First Virtual Communication
• Radvision

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Cuseeme

• CU-SeeMe is audio/video conferencing software
  that allows Internet users to connect one - to -
  one, many - to -many, or any combination with the
  use of a reflector. Any two Internet users can
  directly conference with each other using only
  their own computers. A reflector allows others to
  join in the conference. A reflector is simply a
  "switchboard" that re-sends data in the manner
  the operator of the reflector sets it. Usually,
  it is either set up so all who are connected to
  the reflector can conference with each other, or
  all who are connected view one "broadcast" source.

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VRVS
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Macromedia - Breeze