The road show in Melbourne included amongst others, representatives from Monash University (hosts), The University of Melbourne, University of Ballarat, Deakin University, The Australian Catholic University, La Trobe University, RMIT, Swinburne University, The University of Tasmania and Victoria University.
The delegates agreed to form a special interest group led by Monash, Deakin, VDIT and AARNet to conduct quarterly "show and tell" tours at each site.
James Sankar presented the results of the VIC survey that was conducted as part of the registration process. Many AARNet services were known with positive experiences, with the event creating greater adoption and use in coming months. A number of issues affecting adoption and use in Victoia included costs and access to funding and resources (time, staff), the need for greater staff and user training and some bandwidth and firewall and traffic shaping related issues.
Maggie presented an update on the National Video Conferencing Service and the soon to be released Quality Assurance program, whilst Jason talked briefly about Telepresence, High Def video and desktop video solutions.
Brett presented on work done in building, supporting and publishing live and on demand streaming content for a number of events that AARNet has supported this year and gave an insight to a soon to start Streaming Media group.
Three keynote talks were held.
Polycom's James Brennan
covered the changing landscape resulting in organisational challenges coupled with opportunities to use technology enablers to meet newly emerging user requirements. The converged network was seen as a key component, as to was the ability to deliver a quality easy to use service to end users. Polycom expect services to scale to cover multi-vendor products and to home and mobile users that will bring with it greater security and service management issues.
Professor Farzad Safaei from Smart Services CRC
talked about work to date to develop spatial audio environments for gaming applications and then highlighted new work to develop multi-site to multi-site video conferencing with spatial and stereo audio within a virtual environment under the user's control. This work has just started with the new CRC of which AARNet are a lead partner.
Dean Howarth from C2C
presented on unified communications and the pressing need for it to be defined and for strategies to be put into place ahead of technology decisions. He presented a successful case study completed for the NSW DET to deliver "the connected classroom" based on curriculum expansion, remote excursions from the classroom and training and personal develoopment programs that were included as part of the overall plan. The C2C process relied on end user identification and engagement to confirm requirements prior to listing appropriate technology requirements.
All keynote talks were made available live as Ozeconferences where a number of attendees participated, all talks have been recorded and are available.
| Enabling A High Performance Organisation Using Video
Collaboration - James Brennan - Manager of Technical Sales ANZ,Polycom
Global
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The challenge of immersive multimedia communications - Professor Farzad Safaei, University of Wollongong, Smart Services CRC |
Defining Unified Communications (UC) for your Organization -
Dean Howarth, C2C Analysis |
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Special thanks go to Monash University for hosting this event.
Our next stops are Sydney (23rd Sept) and Brisbane (25th Sept)
Please join us via video if you cannot make it to view the keynote talks -
click here for details