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Shared Workspace

There are many methods of supporting shared workspace activity. The partners are already supporting four different systems from other projects. The important activity here is to support a broad range of application packages. In some of the end user applications, it is necessary that there be a large number of sites watching and listening to a conference; in others, a small number of groups must interact strongly. Another aspect of shared working is the need for conference control. MICE pursues two approaches; a centralised and a distributed approach. The centralised one will be implemented first - mainly by UCL and Nottingham University. A version of the CAR Conference Control System [14] written at UCL has been ported to Sun RPC, Solaris and tcl/tk. This will be used to interface with a booking system for resource allocation, to provide a directory service, conference setup, membership control and basic floor control functionality. On top of this platform, various applications can be intergrated, including Shared-X [14]. In addition, XConfer [15] tools from Xtel/Nottingham University might be integrated into the CAR platform.

This functionality is added to the controlling workstation of the conference room of Fig. 2 and the workstation of Fig. 3.