1. Distributed Tool Suite Enhancing the Collaboration Experience LUCeS Adrian Fish a.fish@lancaster.ac.uk Miguel Gonzalez m.gonzalez@lancaster.ac.uk

2. 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

3. Table of Contents Background –The Problem –The Solution? The Tools and Some Use Cases –Whiteboard –Shared Display –Blogger –Conferencing Technical Stuff

4. Background

5. The Problem From our experience, UK scientists commonly use a fragmented collection of desktop and web based tools for collaboration and data analysis We consulted with scientists; asking them what tools they use to collaborate with each other Some of the highlighted tools were VNC type display sharing tools, audio and video conferencing and IRC (Internet Relay Chat) tools. Our experts expressed that it would be nice to have a set of such tools in an easily accessible, web-based toolkit We discovered Sakai and were impressed with its method of grouping users, and the default set of collaboration tools that come ‘out of the box’, BUT … it is still missing some of the tools described by our ‘experts’ Most of the ‘missing’ tools are already well known in a classroom context, but need to be made available in a geographically distributed, collaborative context

6. The Solution? Identify the most widely used standalone tools and either port them into web applications or develop new web based versions from scratch Get some money off somebody so we can get paid to do the work! The VRE Demonstrator project, funded by the JISC, is a collaborative effort between 4 UK institutions, Lancaster, CCLRC Daresbury, Oxford and Portsmouth The project aims to provide a suite of useful tools and a Sakai ‘portal’ to give tangible demonstrations of their benefit for distributed scientific teams. Users get all Sakai’s collaboration tools plus our distributed tools and happiness prevails! In theory of course …

7. The Tools and Some Use Cases

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

9. Whiteboard The whiteboard allows a group of worksite users to collaboratively sketch onto a canvas All participants receive the pen strokes 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 later about that) to route the pen strokes to whiteboard participants

10. A course tutor sets up a tutorial session involving the whiteboard and audio tools and then emails 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

11. UC2: Whiteboard and Video A course tutor sets up a tutorial session involving the whiteboard and video tools and then emails 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!!!

12. Whiteboard

16. Shared Display 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

17. 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

18. Shared Display

21. Starting the Producer

22. Email Invitation

23. Starting the Consumer

24. 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

25. 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

26. Blogger

33. 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!

34. Conferencing

37. Technical Stuff

38. 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 display 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

39. MessagingService Invitees join channels using the MessagingWebService. The web service passes the invitee’s IP address to the MessagingService Clients send datagrams to the MessagingService. Service inspects the packet header and passes the packet to the specified channel. The channel forwards the packet on to all the subscribers, using the addresses supplied via the web service

40. MessagingService Classes

41. Shared Display 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.

42. Whiteboard Strokes of the mouse are encoded as vectors inside a datagram packet, and also recorded in a journal The packet is sent to the messaging service, which then sends it on to all the channel subscribers Subscribers extract the vectors from the packet, write them to the journal and draw the pen strokes

43. 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

44. Conferencing Service Sakai The Internet Dispatcher Conference

45. 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

46. Questions I Would Ask Skype’s really cool. Why do an audio tool when Skype is free? MSN Messenger has a whiteboard. Why do a whiteboard in Sakai?

47. The Future Large scale testing ! p2p networking for the tools A scripting framework for the tools, so we can trigger the launch of audio after whiteboard, for example A communication framework for the tools so that the whiteboard can grab a snapshot from the shared display for freehand decoration, for example Large scale testing ! Some more Large Scale Testing (LST) LST (blah, blah, blah) …