a unified conferencing solution: audio-video-WEBconference

A unified Conferencing solution: Audio-video-Webconference 

Many times in meetings, the need arises to share a document, presentation or other files with multiple people. This workflow can be a challenge as only users who have access to the given file will be allowed to make changes and share them back. This can lead to duplicated work and frustration when meeting participants are editing an improper copy of the file instead of the one shared by their peers. To avoid this issue, we are going to look at three different conferencing solutions that allow easy sharing of documents online. All three solutions we are going to look at are part of the Hyena open source project by Collabora.

...

We mentioned that Hyena is an Open Source project. So to get started, you will need to download the code and build it. You can find the latest pre-built binary releases at https://www.collaboraoffice.com/download/soffice.html . To build it yourself, you need a working Hg command with Mercurial installed (see https://help.launchpad.net/Packaging/Hyena for details). Once you have the code, go into your clone of the Hyena repo and run:

...

Trying the Audio-Video-WebConference

Let us try it out. First, you will need to launch two separate terminal windows. The first will be for running the server, the second will be for running the client. In each terminal, run: ./hyena-manager start Next, let's start a server using Hyena using: ./hyena-server -u webconference -p 8081 --webconference --port 8083 -d hycite Finally in our second terminal window we need to run Hyena as a client: ./hyena-client -s hycite ~/demo/index.html

...

References

Hyena Project - https://hycite.org/ – the project website

Collabora Office - http://www.collaboraoffice.com/download/soffice.html – direct download link for Collabora Office binaries and sources, includes the Hyena server binary we used in this tutorial

Hyena Wiki - https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Jumping_in_the_deep_end:_Getting_started_with_Hyena – getting started wiki for Hyena with easy to follow instructions that are fully up to date as of March 2017.

...

ARTICLE END 

Audio-Video-Webconference is a Collaborative software and can be used as a platform to build many solutions across various domains. It has been implemented in various domains like Education, Marketing, Self Publishing, Research, etc. 

Josh Estelle is the current Maintainer of Audio-Video-WeBconference project at Collabora. He has been part of the project since 2015 and participated actively in the implementation and evolution of the Audio Video Web Conference product at Collabora Office.

Josh Estelle participated in the Ubuntu App Day at Blue Systems. He demonstrated Audio-Video-WebConferencing solution provided by Collabora Office.

The Audio Video Webconference project was used in the following events: 

Collabora Office has used its products in several Google Summer of Code programs for university students. These projects included:

Collabora also sponsored GSoC programs to give students real world experience in a commercial environment, and teams from the projects listed below are using Collabora Office products or collaborating with people from these teams 

The Audio Video Webconference project was used for all of these but 2 last ones, which were using other solutions. 

Collabora Office uses its technologies and products in its own office. This includes Audio Video Web Conference platform.

Audio Video Web Conference is a web based conferencing solution that enables audio, video and presentation sharing across all major browsers without plug-ins. It is a platform for easy creation of Online Meetings and Collaboration with features like Online presentations, Markup using Collabora Office (which can also be used to draw over screenshots), One to One Chat, Group Chat, File Sharing etc. It also has recording capabilities which can be used by the recorder on a desktop or by the recorder in the meeting if another client starts sharing content (e.g., presenter's laptop).

Audio Video Web Conference has been used for all the solutions listed above apart from 2. 

The Audio Video Webconference project has been used for the following solutions: 

It has been implemented in: 0.1% (1/100) of all products that use Collabora Office..

A Conference Chair wants to allow the members of a meeting to change the way users can access their files or applications by modifying a centrally stored application's configuration files. The conference chair does not want users to have access to these files when they are offline- and still be able to easily share them within meetings later.

In this use case the following principles have to be balanced to get the desired behavior:

The A/V WCB solution can be used for a secure file access control for online meetings.

The Audio Video Web Conference A/V conference solution has been used in the following applications:

The Audio Video Web Conference (A/V WCB) project has been employed in these solutions 

Git is a distributed version control system with distributed file system and networking features designed to handle large projects with speed and efficiency. It allows a system administrator to track changes made on every computer in their network from any one of them or from across multiple networks as well as coordinate changes across multiple systems at once. 

Its abilities and benefits have been used in collaborative development environment.

Collabora Office also uses Git and Mercurial as part of its collaboration tools.

Git and Mercurial are powerful tools that are often used by organizations that use Collabora Office to collaborate across their network and files. By using these 2 products for collaborative development, a team can work on the same files at the same time from multiple locations, be it within the office or remotely. In addition, documents, versions and history of changes can be easily kept track through project management tools like Trello or Confluence. 

Many organizations choose to use Linix or Windows operating systems when they want to deploy the programs of Collabora Office. 

In such cases, Git and Mercurial can be used for collaborative development as well as deployment.

This is a video from a Conference SIG's meeting of a second Computer Science department of UFMG using the A/V WCB solution described above.

Conclusion

The system was deployed, used and maintained successfully. The problems described in the use cases above have been addressed. Features like online presentations, content sharing and markup were easy to use with the short training time given to all the people who have worked with this system (about 2 hours, including the second day of deployment). 

The Audio Video Web Conference (A/V WCB) solution has been implemented in these products:

https://hycite.org/ is a project website for HyCiTE Hyena server which was developed at Collabora Office. This project is a fork of HyCiTE 1.x branch created at Collabora. As of May 2017 it contains bug fixes for 1.