The Applications and Services team held a second training workshop at Queensland University of Technology. Over 50 attendees came from UNE, UNISA, SCU, CSIRO,
USQ, SCQ, UoA, UWS, QUT, VU, QU, QLD Health, DET QLD, St Aidan’s Anglican
School, QUESTACON and our sponsors Polycom, Cisco, Sony, LifeSize, Electroboard
and IPFocus.
Microsoft
OCS Workshop:
Sandra
Lee-Joe
from Microsoft gave a structured talk highlighting Microsoft’s current OCS platform
and shared the OCS roadmap for 2010 including the R2 release of Microsoft OCS. Garvin Long from IP Focus shared his
experiences with OCS and how the participants could get the most from their Video
Conferencing installations. Vanessa
Sulikowski from Cisco highlighted how Cisco products integrate with
Microsoft OCS.
Jouni Stroja and Mr Craig Windell from QUT highlighted the
importance of planning, staff training and effective communications being
important considerations to avoid OCS being viewed as more than a telephone
replacement exercise but as a suite of applications to empower users to work in
new and more productive and collaborative ways. Craig and Jouni took the attendees on a tour of their trials
with different OCS and Alcatel PABX integration options and concluded with
details about a new SIP based approach.
Room acoustics workshop:
Peter Patrick from
Scientific Acoustics presented a slightly modified version of his seminar on
room acoustics presented at the Wollongong event. The audience was largely made
up of technical support personnel though there were both educators and course
design experts who were interested in more of the impact that a badly designed
sound schema would have on education than quantifying the physical attributes
of a space directly.
Peter explained how audio factors
impact on a dynamic teaching space by citing various case studies where similar
issues have occurred. Many of the attendees were glad that more ‘mythical’
aspects of audio collection and dispersion has been explained.
Polycom Workshop:
James Brennan and Lynnette Whitfield
from Polycom led the session. James covered the entire Polycom product range highlighting
Polycom’s OCS functionality. James
focused on Polycom’s desktop video solution and management solutions. He also provided details of the Polycom
roadmap for 2010.
The
new RMX4000 MCU and the RSS4000 recording streaming server (that is designed to
operate together to create a seamless MCU and recording solution) was announced
for the first time.
Video as a mission critical application:
Garvan Long from
IPFocus covered elements needed for a video service to be considered able to
achieve true high availability up time, this was a highly interactive session.
From endpoints to infrastructure
Garvan highlighted the need for control plane redundancy across management
systems, gatekeepers and bridging/gateway hardware. Power and data network
redundancy focus should be about ‘getting the plumbing right’ for positive user
experiences with video system deployments to be achieved.
All things Audio Visual:
A mixed session of talks from various parties:
-
Robyn
Smyth and Deb Vale of UNE presented on the pedagogical impacts of video
from the ALTC Rich Media Technologies project, in which participants
worked together in small groups to whiteboard concepts and ideas on
furthering implementations of video within teaching and learning spaces
- Derek
Powell from the University of
Queensland and The Association of Educational Technology Managers spoke about the Audio Visual perspective for
video conferencing and teaching spaces and how Video over IP advancements
are bringing ICT and AV expertise together to achieve meaningful results.
- Vanessa
Sulikowski of Cisco shared
details of the AARNet and National LambdaRail inter-domain Telepresence demonstration
at Questnet 2009, where a Cisco TP1000 and Cisco TP500 system were
demonstrated with standard definition based connectivity to conventional
endpoints as well as high definition connectivity to USA NLR connected
TelePresence suites across four institutions.
- Jouni
Stroja of QUT outlined the efforts made
to date by the Desktop Video Project Group and the likely outcomes of recent
application tests.
- Jason
Bordujenko presented on SIP
entitled ‘Bringing it all together’ looking at what concepts of SIP as a
standard have been moving well and which parts have stagnated as well as
addressing the key goals of interoperability and what it means to end
users.
- Nathan
Gardiner from New Zealand’s Advanced Video
Collaboration Centre (equivalent body to Australian NVCS) took a look at
the inception of the service through the REANNZ KAREN network and how
their efforts to host a bridging and booking platform have been
progressing and what core competencies are being worked on to bring
support to educational and research bodies embarking on video deployments
in NZ.
Polycom
Keynote talk:
Marci Powell, Global Director for Higher Education and Corporate
Training at Polycom and Chairman of the Board for the United States Distance
Learning Association shared her extensive experience in distance learning and
e-learning in applications related to life long learning and innovations. Marci
joined live via video from Texas, USA.
Photos from the day: http://picasaweb.google.com.au/aarnet.pics/QUTWorkshop14October#
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