Web conferencing

Liane Tarouco

Introduction

The field of Web conferencing software is growing at a breathtaking pace. In the summer of 1994 there were exactly two products in this category, both of them rather primitive freeware packages. Today there are well over 60 commercial and freeware products, many of them quite sophisticated, that support conferencing on the Web in one form or another

Videoconferencing via web

Web Touring and Co-browsing

Web touring (also known as co-browsing or collaborative browsing) is the ability to drive multiple participants to access a sequence of selected Web pages simultaneously

The presenter can synchronize all meeting participants to see exactly the same Web pages that they're accessing live on their computer.

Web touring

Web touring is implemented by way of broadcasting selected URLs to meeting participants and not by sharing the browser application.

The latter entails repeatedly sending an updated image of the screen to all participants, which is both very bandwidth intensive and very slow.

Features Push Web pages Follow-me / Sync-surfing Favorites / Bookmarks Preview Hand-over control Pre-caching Co-scrolling Co-filling Shared pointing tool History of URLs browsed

Push Web pages

Pushing a Web page allows the presenter to force a specific Web page to appear on the end user screen. Pushing Web pages is the very basic level at which co-browsing can be carried out. Some systems force a new browser window on each participant?s computer. The use of this feature theoretically leaves participants free to navigate and independently interact with the Web page received.

Follow-me / Sync-surfing Provides a simple means for the

presenter/moderator to navigate from link to link and from one Web page to another one while automatically "driving" all attendees. In this fashion all participants? browsers sync-up with whatever URL the presenter goes to. Systems missing this feature require the presenter to

type and send out each specific Web page URL that needs to be accessed by the attendees.

Favorites / Bookmarks

The Favorites and Bookmarks feature allow the presenter/moderator to save and manage Web page URLs which need to be easily and rapidly accessed during a live session. In this way, the presenter needs not to type complex Web page URL "on the fly" and can be prepare ahead of time a list of Web page addresses that will need to be presented.

Preview

The co-browsing Preview feature allows the presenter/moderator to literally pre-view a Web page before broadcasting it to all of the meeting participants. This maybe very useful to check the availability of a page or the actual content being displayed before showing the page publicly.

Hand-over control

The Hand-over control feature allows the presenter/moderator in a co-browsing session to give control of the Web tour to any one of the participants in the session. This is very handy in events and presentations where multiple presenters need to take the stage. In most systems, presenters need to be assigned special passwords to access the moderator functions and a unique account must be created for them. The hand-over control feature simplifies this while providing the ability to easily hand-out without prior planning the co-browsing session control to anyone of the participants.

Pre-caching The pre-caching feature allows the automatic and invisible pre-

downloading of the Web pages to be viewed during a co-browsing session across all attendees. The content of the Web pages is downloaded during idle presentation times and is cached in the memory of each attendees computer. The operation takes place completely in the background, is completely transparent to the user, and can be optionally turned off by attendees. This approach allows very fast access to Web pages during a live presentation, and the ability to maintain greater synch with all attendees. This technical ability is presently not available in any web conferencing system available on the market and is one of the over 100 new features that I have identified and described in this new series of upcoming Insider Reports.

Co-scrolling

Co-scrolling is probably the most sought after advanced feature by end users participating in a co-browsing session. As the name implies, co-scrolling provides the ability to scroll Web pages simultaneously with all meeting participants. When the presenter scrolls a Web page, it simultaneously scrolls on all participants? screens.

Co-filling

The co-filling feature originally pioneered by PageShare.com provides ability to fill out online forms, tests and other interactive documents in a collaborative synchronized fashion. The presenter can fill in fields of an online form live, and have the input appear on all attendees forms. Attendees can in turn fill in independently in their forms in the personal sections.

Shared pointing tool A shared pointing tool allows the presenter to show the

mouse cursor to participants in real time over the Web page being shown. This technique that is not presently adopted by none of the players in the market is a actually a combination of screen sharing and co-browsing. While this feature requires that all participants are forced to view the web page co-browsed in a window that is exactly the same size as the presenter, it does allow the presenter to show a light pointer (its appearance should be available in several formats: laser pointer, arrow, blinking dot, hand pointing, mouse cursor, etc.) moving live over the web page content being displayed.

History of URLs browsed

The history of URLs browsed further facilitates the presenter task of going back to Web pages presented during the current or preceding sessions. The feature should allow the history to be shared and be accessed/downloaded by any of the meeting participants.

Products

Cuseeme VRVS Macromedia Breeze

Cuseeme

Cornel University CuSeeme White Pine First Virtual

Communication Radvision

Cuseeme

CU-SeeMe is audio/video conferencing software that allows Internet users to connect one - to - one, many - to -many, or any combination with the use of a reflector. Any two Internet users can directly conference with each other using only their own computers. A reflector allows others to join in the conference. A reflector is simply a "switchboard" that re-sends data in the manner the operator of the reflector sets it. Usually, it is either set up so all who are connected to the reflector can conference with each other, or all who are connected view one "broadcast" source.

VRVS

Macromedia - Breeze