[clue-tech] Evaluation of conferencing solutions during CLUE Installfest 2011m01d22 99CLUE

[Crawford Rainwater]

Comments below.

----- YES NOPE9 <yes at nope9.com> wrote: -----
> 
> Prelim version 0.0.1
> 
> Jon B. ( spelling ? ) , David Willson and Gus Calabrese looked at
> various aspects of conferencing at the installfest.
> 
> Some of the webcams worked really well. The Logitech C910 ( GC ) and
> the Logitech Orbit ( DW ) were nice. The Orbit has pan and tilt built
> in. Photos will be posted at http://www2.cluedenver.org/
> When there were multiple webcams and microphones on a laptop , it was
> unclear how to select the webcam and audio source that one wanted.
> 

Ummm, on the photo posting portion, hold that thought for now.  I would still like to get "www" migrated over to "www2" first before "adding on".  What I will probably end up doing is doing a MySQL DB dump of "www2" into "www3" and let folks R&D that a bit.  Same with the other requested features, but then again the migration and retention of existing web pages over to Drupal is taking some time.  Especially for one person doing this.

> Sharing a desktop ( all or region ) did not work very well. Update
> rate was slow.
> 
> We were wondering if the bandwidth available at installfest was
> affecting our results.
> 

What type of bandwidth does DeVry have?  Per our logs, things seemed fine on our end with minimal impact.  What else was running on the system(s) sharing out the desktops as well plus the system's resources (RAM and video card info in particular)?

> Comments about http://clue.linux-etc.com/
> Position of tabs for BigBlueButton ( BBB ) and OpenMeetings ( OMS ) is
> confusing.
> 

The "extra rooms" will be removed shortly.  This was in the event others wanted to try out individual conference room sessions (I think there was ~5 room up).  For now, CLUE will be going to the "Conference Room" top menu bar link.

> Features that Gus wants for moderator. ( they may exist and he just
> overlooked them )
> #1 Whiteboard allows images to be placed on it as an object that can
> be resized, moved.
> Then the markup tools can be used.

I believe OM and BBB can both do this.

> #2 Choose the quality of audio for all participants

That is dependent on a few things.  For the participants, they can check things via Flash on their end system.  Then you throw into the mix microphone quality, end client system's resource being used, etc.  Reference the following which should work for both BBB and OM:

http://openmeetings.googlecode.com/svn/docs/manuals/OpenMeetings%20Manual%20for%20User%20level.pdf

On page 8, Section 2.1 in particular.  There is a discussion on the BBB mailing list as well about these same "pre-flight" issues.  OM has a "pre-flight" check though before entering the conference room as noted which is handy I suspect.

> #3 Choose the quality of video for all participants ( frame rez and
> frame update rate )

Same as #2 above.

> #4 Easily select portion of presenter desktop to show. ( and readjust
> )
> 

OM has this, BBB has this as well.  OM allows for this to be adjust mid-session IIRC, not sure on BBB.

Other thoughts and comments from the peanut gallery? ;-)

--- Crawford

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