18/06/2007 Adrian Fish, Miguel Gonzalez Losa - NeSC Methods and Technologies for Enabling Virtual Research Communities

18/06/2007 Adrian Fish, Miguel Gonzalez Losa - NeSC The Agora Online Meeting Tool

18/06/2007 Adrian Fish, Miguel Gonzalez Losa - NeSC Introduction Agora: Means ‘now’ in Asturiano and Portuguese Is an online meeting tool, developed by Lancaster University intially using JISC money and is now funded by the ESRC Is an ancient Greek work meaning ‘meeting place’

18/06/2007 Adrian Fish, Miguel Gonzalez Losa - NeSC Agora Overview Agora is a online meeting tool aimed at the office or home user. It was designed to help researchers make online collaboration an integrated part of their daily office routine It has been designed with ease of use as the main target

18/06/2007 Adrian Fish, Miguel Gonzalez Losa - NeSC Sakai Overview Sakai is a web-based collaboration environment. Open source, backed by a large community of developers, researchers and teachers. Scalable and modular. Is an excellent complement for Agora’s features

18/06/2007 Adrian Fish, Miguel Gonzalez Losa - NeSC Agora is Easy Agora has been designed from the ground up to be simple to use. The user interface is consistent and intuitive. Installation is transparent to the user. The Agora software is installed in the background when the user first joins a meeting by clicking a webpage link.

18/06/2007 Adrian Fish, Miguel Gonzalez Losa - NeSC Agora is Useful Multi-way video conferencing with no limit on participants Desktop sharing Shared whiteboard Movie-casting Chat Portal Integration (Sakai and Moodle)

18/06/2007 Adrian Fish, Miguel Gonzalez Losa - NeSC Agora is Cheap to Run The Agora server can be run on cheap hardware and free software A server with 2 GB of memory and 1.5 TB of resilient storage costs approximately £1,600 Such a server on a standard network connection will handle around 100 concurrent Agora conferences Each Agora user needs a Java Runtime Environment (free) and a £20 webcam and headset. That’s all.

18/06/2007 Adrian Fish, Miguel Gonzalez Losa - NeSC Architecture Agora service: a web application, deployable in any servlet container, that actually holds the meetings. Agora Console: another web application that serves up the meeting setup user interface Agora Portal Plugin: These plugins form the integration points with portal frameworks. We currently have plugins for Sakai and Moodle Agora Desktop: Using the Agora Desktop you can create meetings, manage contacts and get popup notifications of interesting events.

18/06/2007 Adrian Fish, Miguel Gonzalez Losa - NeSC SAKAI Plugin Console Service Agora Desktop Alerts Agora Client Launches VoIP / RTP Traffic

18/06/2007 Adrian Fish, Miguel Gonzalez Losa - NeSC Agora Service The Agora service is responsible for maintaining information about meetings in progress The service provides the software multicasting functionality for routing video, audio and message data between participants Can be installed in a Tomcat server by just copying a file and setting up a simple properties file

18/06/2007 Adrian Fish, Miguel Gonzalez Losa - NeSC Agora Console The Agora console is the area where users create meetings. The console interface is rendered in the portal plugin The console is deployed into a webapp container as a standard WAR file. A simple properties file, similar to Sakai’s, is used to wire the console to the service.

18/06/2007 Adrian Fish, Miguel Gonzalez Losa - NeSC Agora Plugins The Agora console is surfaced in portal tools using a plugin. In the case of Sakai, this is a standard Sakai Tool, in the case of Moodle, this is a module. The plugin passes user lists through to the console so the meeting initiator can pick from a list of their group members The plugin also provides authentication services to the console

18/06/2007 Adrian Fish, Miguel Gonzalez Losa - NeSC Agora Desktop Works in a similar fashion to Microsoft Messenger Runs in the Windows taskbar Pops up a message when one of your contacts comes online, or when you are invited to a meeting. Gives access to your portal group members. Just select and click one button to setup a meeting Invite people who are not users of your portal system. Invitee just clicks a link to join, no login required

18/06/2007 Adrian Fish, Miguel Gonzalez Losa - NeSC Open Source Timeline 27/06/ Re-architecture complete. V1 Feature set finalised. Apache 2.0 license applied. New binary release on Agora website. 06/07/ Agora CVS opened up, JIRA setup. Agora developers worksite setup at Lancaster Sakai 2.5 integration

18/06/2007 Adrian Fish, Miguel Gonzalez Losa - NeSC Current Work Portal plugin architecture Windows taskbar popups Standalone version Improved codecs for Mac. Wrapping of libavcodec libraries in JMF codec classes Improved Linux support, V4L 2 support will open up many more cameras

18/06/2007 Adrian Fish, Miguel Gonzalez Losa - NeSC About us Adrian Fish: Miguel Gonzalez: