The road show in Sydney included amongst others, representatives from The University of Sydney (hosts), The University of New England, Charles Sturt University, University of Technology, UNSW, UWS and a host of other universities and schools.
James Sankar presented the results of the NSW survey that was conducted as part of the registration process. Many AARNet services were known however greater awareness, adoption and use was encouraged in coming months. Many attendees were from the schools sector and may well be one reasin for low awareness and use. A number of issues affecting adoption and use in Sydney included issues surrounding technology and integration, costs and access to funding and resources (time, staff), the need for greater staff and user training.
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.Some live demos were performed.
Three keynote talks were held.
Graham Keys, QUT
spoke about the Integrated Collaboration environments project. He talked covered the journey with Gartner to define “collaboration” from a people and process viewpoint. Unified Communications was seen as an important platform to manage a range of real time applications. Change Mgt was seen as a key component. Presence was being deployed with confluence wikis and Microsoft sharepoint. Integration remains a challenge, simple integration work tended to be more complex than originally thought. Servers were virtualised, whilst vendors still struggle with “licences” as they see no difference between staff/student users.
Chris Willing, QCIF
presented on the Optiputer, a computer distributed across the world via an IP network, with the Optiportal being an element (a cluster tiled display). He mention that the latest version of Access Grid was not supported because the “Rocks” (CentOS) version wasn't compatible, also multicast is required on the public networks for AG use whilst the Optiportal tended to operate on private networks. Another OS is possible but brings more work, Rocks 5 hasn’t provided all the answers (hence on 4.3), some other options are being explored at the present time as it is still a fairly new solution.
Leon Li, AARNet
presented on changes being planned to AARNet gatekeepers and gateways. Feedback from staff indicated that changes be notified a number of mailing lists (vvc-l, voice-l and site-l)
Keynote 1 -
Increasing connectivity across a decentralised office environment,
Queensland University of Technology: A Case Study
- Graham Keys, QUT
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Keynote 2 - Access Grid for the Optiportal
- Chris Willing (QCIF)
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Special thanks go to The University of Sydney for hosting this event.
Our final event for 2008 takes plave in Brisbane on 25th Sept at Griffith University, Southbank campus. Please join us via video if you cannot make it to view the keynote talks -
click here for details