5th Meeting - 18th December 2009

Agenda

Host: Johnny Widén

0. Responsable person for taking minutes
1. Summary from Sunet benchmark test 5
2. Connect 7.5
Has anyone upgraded? Sunet plan to do it during Christmas vacation
3. Summary from a meeting with David Heath, Adobe's learning manager
4. A visit to Adobe and some US universities during Q1 2010
I plan a US visit in, say February, to be able to get some further insight in the usage of Connect and am wondering if some else of you would care to join. No details are ready yet. ...Yes, I know; this is not living as I preach, however, there are some benefits of making visits in flesh and blood...
5. Wiki structure
See my earlier mail on a suggested structure (see below in the minutes)
6. Requirements list
7. Bug list
8. Host for next meeting

Minutes

Taken by Sami Andberg
Data Communications Specialist - Funet - Video Technology

EACU 18th December 2009:

Meeting started 11:15

0. Responsable person for taking minutes

Sami Andberg

1. Summary from Sunet benchmark test 5

Summary (test4):

We had instructed people to arbitrary join 50 test rooms. We had at most 228 users.

Test in many rooms took place 13:00-17:00 with a maximum of 228 concurrent users spread out in 18 test rooms plus some more rooms with single participant in each.

The mean value of number of users were 8.45 in each room with around 6.5 sending video. The CPU on one server want up to at most 100% and the other to 90%. According to reports from the rooms the meetings worked well.

After the scheduled test those who were left decided to gather in one room, where we were at most 48 users of which 36 were sending video. During this time the cpu of both servers went up to 100% and it became impossible to have a reasonable dialog. We had a delay on about 15 seconds with at most 90 seconds. Unfortunately we missed to test a parallel meeting in a less crowded meeting.

Is Adobe Connect mainly a presentation tool? Or the collaboration tool that we want?

Summary (test 5):

Maximum number of concurrent users were 313, they were spread out in 48 meeting rooms with an average of 6.5 users in each room. Measured in the 26 testing rooms were an average of 8 users of which 6.5 were sending video. This gives us 80% video senders and applying that on all meeting rooms we got 5.2 video senders in each room and a total of 250 video senders. The cpus of both servers went up to 100% and reports from users show that the experiences varies a lot. Some were satisfied with the meetings, while some others were not satisfied at all.

Pasi Häkkinen: (11:38) My experience from SUNET test 5: audio and video worked mostly OK, but UI had big delays: chat messages came 1 min late in worst case

Questions

Will upgrading to 7.5 make a difference?
7.5 is said to support VMWare
What tools exist to monitor the behavior of the system on a daily basis?
Number of active meetings, number of active users, file usage, etc.
How could we test system performance without involving people?
Adobe should have some means for such a test

Jan Ruzicka: according to the documentation, SSL should be run on a different server with a different IP address
Batic -> Jan: Michael Krsek(?) had been evaluating Flash media servers - could he run some tests on the FMS used inside ACP setup
Batic: FMS r. Mustang 3_0_4_431, the version of FMS in AC 7.5

2. Connect 7.5

Has anyone upgraded? Sunet plan to do it during Christmas vacation

Batic: using 7.5 has helped in audio problems
Jan: No documentation for the configuration of the media gateway.

3. Summary from a meeting with David Heath, Adobe's learning manager

Meeting with Adobe, November 18, 2009

Participants
David Heath, Director of Education Sales EMEA, Adobe Systems
Joke Palmkvist, Adobe Systems Nordic AB
Johnny Widén, SUNET

1. Presentation of SUNET's Adobe Connect service
2. Presentation of Adobe Education in EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa)
3. European Adobe Connect Users group
4. European beta testers
5. US visit, Adobe, Purdue University, ...
    - Will get help to setup a visit, say, late February. Anyone interested in joining in?
6. Advanced in-depth courses
7. Deeper contact with Adobe
    - Joke will promote contact with John Schuman, Education Solutions Architect, Adobe Systems Inc.
    - Invite John to our next meeting?

4. A visit to Adobe and some US universities during Q1 2010

Johnny plans a US visit in, say February, to be able to get some further insight in the usage of Connect and am wondering if some else of you would care to join. No details are ready yet. ...Yes, I know; this is not living as I preach, however, there are some benefits of making visits in flesh and blood...

Vicente (UVigo.es): (12:00) I agree, but online meeting with US adopters could be great too

5. Wiki structure

Suggestion from Johnny:

Home
Members (and licenses)
Feature requests
Bug reports
Meetings
Useful links
Restricted pages

Home:
Mission statement
News

Members:
A list of all members with links to member pages
Member page:
Presentation with a description of licenses and setup
Member list of feature requests in preferred order
-- Titles of the requests with links to pages describing the requests
Member list of bug reports in preferred order
-- Titles of the bugs with link to pages describing the bugs

Feature requests:
A list of feature requests
   -- Titles of the requests with links to pages describing the requests
   -- Ordered in importance based on total member prioritization by automatically calculation (based on order on member pages) or votes
A list of new request
   -- In order of creation date
Feature request (one page for each request)
Description
Motivation
--To add a new feature request: create a new page and put the link in the "new" list

Bug reports:
-- Same structure as Feature requests

Meetings:
-- Minutes and recordings from meetings

Useful links:
-- What it is

Restricted pages: (ARNES proposal)
Next meetings (agendas, time schedules...)
How to put pressure on adobe
Description of AC setups & modifications with source files
Help between eacu members
Adobe contacts

Johnny: Who will do the work?

6. Requirements list

Johnny: Dalarna has a nice interface for ACP: http://samtal.du.se

Jan: we should aggregate all audio stuff into a single case

Batic: introduced new free field for users - imported expiration date from Shibboleth. if the account is expiring, send out email for user and delete the account after a certain period

Discussion about prioritization of the requiremements list
PDF support added in 7.5, good.
what other formats are needed?

More collaboration tools would be needed too

Kathrin: Connect Now has automatic bandwidth detection - would be useful

The following is added by Johnny: I edited the list during the meeting, I will put it on a separate page:

Discussion of feature requests on top list

(1) First two on Audio: Configuration of OS + Flash Audio settings improvements
() Better echo cancellation on Windows, Mac and Linux platforms
-- Comment put all audio issues in one topic
(2) subadministrator rights

(2) More user roles with custom predefined rules (Better customization of user rights and roles for an AC installation, but also for each meeting room.)

(3) Adobe Connect Add-in for Linux

(4) Better sound indicators in the meeting room (level indicator)
(lower rated)

(5) Possiblity to better video quality (Use of H.264 video instead of Flash 8 (better codec)) Multiple video pods
Control of quality

(6) Better text edting features in Note Pod (lower rated)
Fonts, style, who wrote what, history (undo) "word pod?"

(7) Possibilty of individual views

(8) Built in QoS test of users internet connection, better debugging options during a meeting
higher rated

(9) Export of recordings / Metadata to FMS server or other Mediacontent Servers

(10) Better realtime statistics (guest users in reports?)

(11) More File Formats in Share pod

(12) Clean up procedure for inactive users, feature request or possible via api. rather no FR (=Feature Request)

(13?) SIP-integration (in 7.5 ?, Jan will test)
lower rated because no user request

7. Bug list

Johnny: no data in the logs for guests, only registered users?
Jan: cannot found data is there are users connected at a certain time - would be nice when reboot needed, etc

Jan: View permission possibility missing for meeting folders
Batic: possible on API - set view on root folder, and it will propagate to all sub folders where 'public' is to empty

Johnny: do the teachers have permission to set up rooms on their own
Jan:
Johnny: staff members have possibility to create their own rooms and thus manage their own space - in most cases this is enough

Batic: under user - folders for each organisation - manage set via API for teachers for their folders
Jan: user needs to have manage priviliges to all avobe levels too to be able to see the rooms?
Batic: only organisators can create meeting rooms at the moment - moving towards teachers creating their own rooms

Batic: if you switch to a layout without video pod, everyone becomes muted

Johnny: during user testing, the online statistics were not functioning properly (showed top participants even after some had left)

There was no time to discuss all items in the bug list.