Client

The client is EIDOS - large Italian telecommunication company, specialized in conferencing solutions.

Background

Global competition and economic needs have made web conferencing more mainstream for nearly any enterprise with multiple locations, limited budgets, or a dispersed client base. As a part of daily business activities, web conferencing enables users to accomplish business goals with lower costs, more efficiently. On-demand web conferencing or web meetings has become the preferred communication medium for business today. By combining the ease of audio conferencing with the interactivity of video conferencing directly from your desktop, it is possible to create a truly personalized interactive experience.

EIDOS web meeting applications are delivered on-demand for immediate use with no significant up-front costs, servers to maintain or software to install. With just a web browser and a telephone, anyone can use EIDOS WC for general meetings or one of the specialized applications for online events, training, sales, and support.

The idea of the project was to create a truly competitive set of applications in the sphere of web conferencing, audio and video conferencing. Phase 1 of the project was purposed for development of web conferencing engine, without audio and video functionality.

Solution

It was agreed with the customer that WebEx product line should be used as model for business analysis. In addition - it was decided to add several new useful features WebEx doesn't have. 2 persons from our side Systems performed a deep functional analysis of  competitor's products and prepared a set of formal documents with the description of business flows, GUI forms, use cases and so on.

Architecturally and technically the project is very complicated and challenging. During our work with the customer a lot of various aspects were resolved such as Proxy/NAT friendly operation, good performance and compression algorithms, updates delivery and installation, balancing and clustering and so on.

Key features

The following major functional modules were developed within the project:

• Desktop sharing and remote control
• Applications sharing
• Slide Show
• Whiteboard and drawing capabilities, layering, annotations
• Record & Playback of a conference
• Instant messaging
• Online status check, connection status
• Voting & questionings
• File sharing
• Web touring

Technical overview

EIDOS WC consists of the client side module and server part. One of the general requirements from the customer was to use MS.NET platform for the server side and Java for the client application. Such set of technologies allowed having quite fast and efficient backend as well as portable front-end. The client application is a combination of Java application based on SWING and system-specific agent written in C++ to handle system events. The Java part is common for all operation systems, but system agent is tailored to the OS it is running on - Unix, Linux, Windows, MAC OS. Java WebStart is used for delivery of the client part to customers PCs.

• portability (multi browsers for client side, Unix and MAC support for server side)
• skinnable interface
• runtime localization
• Proxy/NAT/Firewall friendly

Benefits for the customer

• Additional business opportunity in selling of conferencing services
• Better usability and performance than in existing systems

Technologies and products used

• Client side: J2EE, Swing, Java WebStart, JPEG compression library
• Server side: MS.NET, C#, NET Security, Remoting

Project workload

The project team for phase 1 comprised 5 people, and project duration was 9 months.

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