conference systems

[Navena S. Saxena]

I have been reading some postings about conferencing systems over the
last few days. At the Concurrent Engineering Research Center (CERC) at WVU, 
I have been working on one such program. I have a prototype that works on
Sun 4's and Silicon Graphics 4D machines, and I am in the process of
porting it on Vax's and HP 9000 machines. It is based on the Client-Server
model and should port easily on Unix machines supporting 4.2BSD IPC.
The prototype presently uses X for display handling but is again easily
portable to any othe windowing system, which I thought would be an
important feature. Currently it uses the Athena Widget set for handling
displays.

The present capabilities of the tool are :

Allow several people located in different locations to be called for a
multilogue.

Have multiple windows for each participant in the conference. For example
with three people in the conference there shall be three windows on each
workstation, one for each of the three users.

Each window would display the id of each of the users it corresponds to.

On of these windows is the user's "Send Window". The user types in his
send window.

Ability to scroll each of the windows to see what had transpired earlier.

A reasonable screen editor for editing text that the user types in his
send window.

Ability to call other users in the conference if needed.

Ability to exit the conference without affecting the other participants in
the conference.

Ability to be able to whisper to only a select set of participants, that
is not broadcast the message.

I am currently working on :

Ability to set up conferences on workstations running different windowing
systems.

Archive the conference session and provide browse capability to search
through archives to locate the right log for purpose of retreival. Further
to allow searching thoughts or messages by keywords in a single log.

Have a common canvas on which every user's messages appears. The canvas
would also be scrollable and all messages would appear as a "response to
what" fashion. This implies that every user before sending his message would
need to specify whether his message starts a new thought or is in response
to someone else's message.

To provide for order in which messages should appear on the canvas.

Ability to be able to send bitmaps across to be displayed by different
windowing system. This would imply that if a user had a picture on his
workstation which was created using a CAD tool, then he should be able
to select this picture or a part of it and send it to everyone else in
the conference.

There is a notion of a chairperson of the conference session. The
chairperson has the responsibility of making sure that the conference session
proceeds in an orderly fashion. To insure this the chairperson would have
special privileges.

The participants of the conference should be able to select the chairperson.

The chairperson should be able to transfer responsibility to someone else in
the conference.

When the chairperson finally closes the conference session, he should be able
to summarise the session into what it acheived, what the new agenda is and
this should be available to every other participant as an epilogue. The
epilogue should also be stored in the same log.


This work is done at CERC, with support from DARPA, for which I must add:

Acknowledgements - This work has been sponsored by Defense Advanced 
Research Projects Agency (DARPA), under contract No. MDA972-88-C-0047
for DARPA Initiative in Concurrent Engineering (DICE).

I would welcome any suggestions and hopoefully be able to post the
sources soon.

Naveen Saxena (email : saxena at cerc.wvu.wvnet.edu)
	      (phone :(304) 296-7920 (office))