Distributed Tool Suite Enhancing the Collaboration Experience Adrian Fish Miguel Gonzalez LUCeS (Lancaster University Centre for e-Science)

About Us We work for the Centre for e-Science (LUCeS) at Lancaster University in the UK We are currently funded, by the JISC, to develop an e-Research environment for UK scientists using Sakai We have been focusing on developing advanced collaboration tools that extend and complement the standard ‘out of the box’ tool set that comes with Sakai

Table of Contents Background The Tools and Some Use Cases Work in Progress Technical Stuff

Background

Sakai (In a nutshell …) Sakai is open source software designed primarily to provide online learning environments for universities and colleges It provides lots of default functionality, like group resource sharing, textual chat, discussion boards, course authoring and assessment tools. It is an application framework in that it provides services to programmers who want to add new functionality. The units of functionality in the case of Sakai are called tools

The VRE Demonstrator Project (in a nutshell …) The project will provide a suite of useful tools hosted in a Sakai ‘portal’. It will give tangible demonstrations of the benefit of such tools for distributed scientific teams. Users of the demonstrator will get all of Sakai’s collaboration tools plus our distributed tools and happiness prevails! In theory of course … We have identified some of the most widely used standalone tools and are either porting them into web applications or develop new web based versions from scratch The VRE Demonstrator project is funded by the JISC. The project is a collaborative effort between 4 UK institutions, Lancaster, CCLRC Daresbury, Oxford and Portsmouth

The Tools and Some Use Cases

A Quick Overview Whiteboard – a many-to-many drawing tool Shared Desktop – a one-to-many desktop sharing tool Blogger – a Sakai blogging tool Conferencing – a tool for creating and participating in audio and video conferences

Whiteboard The whiteboard allows a group of worksite users to collaboratively draw and manipulate shapes on a canvas All participants receive the shapes from every other participant Can be used with the audio tool to build freehand diagrams as a team, work on mathematical formulae, etc. Drops straight into Sakai with minimal configuration Uses the MessagingService (more about that later) to route the pen strokes to whiteboard participants

A course tutor sets up a tutorial session involving the whiteboard and audio tools and then s an invitation to her students Students log into the worksite at the pre-arranged time and start the tutorial session The tutor draws on the whiteboard and talks to her students simultaneously bla, bla bla UC1: Whiteboard and Audio

UC2: Whiteboard and Video A course tutor sets up a tutorial session involving the whiteboard and video tools and then s an invitation to her students She shows a quartz rock to her students, freezes the image, partially sketches the crystal structure and asks a student to complete the sketch Quartz!!!

Whiteboard

Shared Desktop Allows Sakai users to broadcast JPEG images of their desktop to a select group of fellow worksite users Network friendly. Only the area of screen that has changed is sent to subscribers When used in conjunction with the audio tool you have a powerful tool for document editing or collaborative software development Only the producer needs to have installed the software visible in the display being broadcast -all that is being sent is a stream of JPEGs

Shared Display Use Cases A team wants to work on a document together. As one types the others watch, and can discuss the changes using the audio tool. This could be a Word document, a Java source file in Eclipse, Photoshop … A tutor demonstrates some software to her students. She uses the software whilst talking about her actions. The students watch, listen and can ask questions via the audio tool Edit View Talk Show View Talk

Shared Desktop

Starting the Producer

Invitation

Starting the Consumer

Blogger Brings powerful blog functionality to Sakai Worksite users can author rich blog entries, can insert inline images and attach files Title, abstract and keywords can be specified for each entry Two editing modes, rich text (WYSIWYG) and html Private, worksite and public visibility of entries, specified by author Entries can be searched easily Entries can be commented by other worksite users

Blogger Use Cases Can be used as a shared journal for a tutorial group. The journal entries will be stored in the database for later use Can be used to construct lessons; text, images, links and attachments can be combined together. The same approach can be used to construct a ‘newspaper’ for a worksite

Blogger

Conferencing Gives Sakai worksite users the ability to start, and participate in, full multi-way audio and video conferences from within the Sakai environment The audio tool adds value to the other tools in the suite - it is hard ‘doing’ textual chat whilst using a whiteboard!

Conferencing

Work in Progress

Whiteboard WiP Shape locking: As soon as a participant selects a shape to be moved, the shape is locked to other users. The lock is removed when the owner’s modifcations are complete. Broadcast mode: One participant is designated the broadcaster, the rest are viewers. This will satisfy the well known scenario of a teacher in a classroom. Saving Drawings: Each participant will be able to save the drawing, in its current state, to the Sakai resources tool. In broadcast mode only the broadcaster will be able to do this

Conferencing WiP Video Broadcast: Any participant in a video conference session will be able to stream a MPEG,AVI or MOV format video file to the other participants Session Recording: Any participant will be able to record a conferencing session and save it onto their own PC Floor Control: Both turn based or moderator controlled floor control AG Integration: A protocol bridge to VIC/RAT to allow AGN session participants to join Sakai hosted sessions

Shared Desktop WiP Document Handoff: Participants can take turns editing (and broadcasting) a document by passing the document file between themselves Whiteboard Integration: This will allow operations such as taking a still of the desktop into a whiteboard session for annotation purposes

Technical Stuff

MessagingService A Spring component that allows tool clients to create new channels with specified users Drops into Sakai using a standard maven build Is currently used by the whiteboard and shared desktop tools, but is generic enough to be easily used for others Comes with a Sakai tool base class that handles all of the interaction with the messaging service. This can be specialised into your tool by implementing a few simple methods

Shared Desktop Uses the MessagingService to send JPEG desktop snapshots to channel subscribers Screen is broken into a set of tiles, designed to fit into a 64KB datagram packet. At 32bpp colour depth, this equates to a 128 pixel square tile per datagram Only the tiles that have changed are sent; this should hopefully reduce bandwidth requirements One-to-many. The user that creates the channel becomes the publisher and their screen is grabbed, split and broadcast to the other channel users.

Whiteboard Shapes are encoded in an ascii text format inside packets before being sent to the messaging service The packet is sent to the messaging service, which then forwards it on to all the channel subscribers Upon receipt, subscribers extract the shape from the packet and render it on their whiteboard display Each shape has a unique id so each whiteboard can avoid duplication when receiving shape packets

ConferencingService The conferencing service is a Spring component that drops into Sakai and needs minimal configuration It sets up four datagram sockets and routes packets received on these sockets to the relevant conference object Implements a software multicast algorithm and delivers all the received datagrams to all conference subscribers

Audio/Video Conferencing Both audio and video conferences are controlled from one Sakai tool Both use JMF on the client and the conferencing service on the server (Sakai) The conferencing service is a software multicasting system and follows the well known publish/subscribe model for users joining conferences It needs four ports open on the Sakai host machine, two for audio’s data and control (RTP and RTCP) packets and two for the video. The service dispatches the packets to the correct conference object for forwarding to subscribers

Distributed Tool Suite Enhancing the Collaboration Experience Adrian Fish Miguel Gonzalez LUCeS (Lancaster University Centre for e-Science)