[tei-council] Webex-experience

[O'Donnell, Dan]

Hi Lou,

I agree with you that it was surprisingly clunky for a web-app, though 
of course such things need to go through a clunky phase and it is not so 
long ago that we were having trouble with skype-based teleconference 
software (which is now both cheap and working well). In recent weeks 
I've been on a few other systems (unfortunately forget their names, 
though I think were probably MS) and they worked better, so the systems 
can work.

I agree with you regarding my experience with the setup: it took a long 
time to load, was not particularly intuitive, and its call-out functions 
seemed to set off my voice mail. And I never managed to get any kind of 
desktop or anything (running firefox 3.5 on Ubuntu 9.10). I kept getting 
a "return to conference" button that did nothing when selected.

However: nothing ventured, nothing gained.

-dan

Lou wrote:
> I thought it might be helpful to others contemplating the use of webex 
> to report on my experience with it.  Probably my rather negative 
> reactions arise from unrealistic expectations/naivety on my part, rather 
> than any serious defects in the product, but for what it's worth, I 
> tried it out in earnest with a serious conference involving about 17 
> people scattered around the world, and we had to abandon it after about 
> 10 minutes. That's not counting the hour or two I put in on other tests 
> beforehand.
>
> The executive summary: it does NOT work out of the box.
>
> Here are some specific problems we encountered:
>
> 1. You have to install additional software in addition to your web 
> client to connect to the conference. This can take a significant amount 
> of time, depending on your client and your connexion, and (as was the 
> case for one of our participants) it can be impossible if you don't have 
>   sufficient privileges on the machine you're using. So for example you 
> couldn't use webex from a teaching room machine, unless it has been 
> previously configured with the webex client.
>
> 2. Some combinations of platform/browser Just Do Not Work. We had 
> problems reported with Opera (any platform), Thunderbird (Mac OS), and 
> there may be others.
>
> 3. The telephone access is very variable in quality. One of our 
> participants (unfortunately the chair) could not use it because of the 
> amount of background noise (and his network access was poor because of 
> lowfi-wifi). Other telephone users were very loud or very quiet, or just 
> suddenly dropped out.
>
> 4. I could not find any way of transmitting video using Ubuntu/Firefox 
> (though I could receive it, and other applications could see my webcam)
>
> 5. Of our 17 participants, two needed to try several machines before 
> they got a working installation; three got things working, but then 
> found that they lost audio; two were unable to get satisfactory network 
> connectivity (so their audio was too bursty to be comprehensible). 
> Participants were located in the US, in Canada, and in various parts of 
> Europe. They were all reasonably competent IT-skilled people.
>
> If I were going to use it again (which I would like to because when it 
> works it is very nice, as well as saving us money), I would invest time 
> and effort beforehand in setting up a conversation with each of the 
> participants in turn, to check that their local configuration was OK. We 
> did that for some of our participants and those were the ones (mostly) 
> for whom everything more or less worked. The mistake I made was probably 
> to assume that because it was "just a web browser", everything would 
> work straight off. It doesn't.
>
>
>
>
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>   

-- 
Daniel Paul O'Donnell
Associate Professor of English
University of Lethbridge

Chair and CEO, Text Encoding Initiative (http://www.tei-c.org/)
Co-Chair, Digital Initiatives Advisory Board, Medieval Academy of America
President-elect (English), Society for Digital Humanities/Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs (http://sdh-semi.org/)
Founding Director (2003-2009), Digital Medievalist Project (http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/)

Vox: +1 403 329-2377
Fax: +1 403 382-7191 (non-confidental)
Home Page: http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/