Video Collaboration Tools
The Collab Room, the lab space for the HAVnet project, opened in 2005 and provided us with greatly improved ability to participate in and host video collaborative networked events and research. It support numerous styles and qulity of video collaboration, shared applications, and very flexbile setup for educational activities.
Core Collaborative Tool:
After studying several collaborative technologies, the team selected AccessGrid, an open-source video collaboration system, to enable multiple groups to connect simultaneously from multiple locations worldwide. The application provided the flexibility to support the types of educational and research activity that were required for this project: collaborative work sessions to plan and stage interactive high bandwidth educational events, team training sessions, and seminar series on surgical simulation for both Stanford and nationwide collaborators.
AccessGrid has an installed base of over 20,000 users in 56 countries. The main issue with Access Grid is that the system is used primarily in academic environments and works best on networks that supports multicast.
Other Video Collaboration Tools: With this infrastructure, it is also easy to use off-the-shelf collaboration tools, such as iChat, Skype or other one-to-one communication software packages. In addition, Marratech's free client software is easily downloaded for Macs or PC. Stanford has a server license on campus that allows small group meetings of up to ten people. For a better image quality and fewer cameras, the LifeSize system works well. This is a standalone system with all the hardware components packaged together (similar to Polycom). These systems also allow for desktop sharing. There is much less setup involved with commercial products.
For a system with collaboration tools, whether it is one to one or many to many, the best solution is Marratech. There is a white board that can be used for illustration or marking on an existing document. Marratech also accommodates most network configurations, so people can join from home and from behind firewalls. There is also a Virtual Network Computing (VNC) type feature where a user can share their desktop for others to see.