NCSA Tests WebEx Collaboration Tool

The service is WebEx, a Web-based system that allows people to collaborate with colleagues, share applications, present demonstrations and training, and provide desktop support using only a desktop computer and a Web browser. WebEx is a service of WebEx, Inc. (formerly ActiveTouch, Inc.) of Santa Clara, CA. The company recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with NCSA, in which the center agreed to experimentally use WebEx for remote training, meetings, and desktop support. WebEx, Inc. will use feedback from NCSA to improve the capabilities of WebEx, specifically capabilities that help scientists, engineers, and other high performance computer users.

"Our use of WebEx is part of our ongoing process of experimenting with technologies that meet the needs of the scientific computing community," said NCSA Senior Associate Director John Towns. "One of the key priorities of the Alliance is to provide an easy-to-use, Web-based environment for scientific computing and collaboration, and WebEx is one tool that could contribute to that. It can be used to conduct remote meetings, and to share data and applications without the use of anything more complicated than a telephone and a Web browser."

With the WebEx service, users log in to a meeting from the WebEx website meetingcenter.v35.webex.com/ " target="_new meetingcenter.v35.webex.com/ )). Audio for the meeting is provided via a standard telephone -- participants who join a meeting can either dial in or the meeting organizer can call them. Using the Web interface, participants can view and edit documents, manipulate documents on machines at remote locations, surf the Web as a group, and control the desktops of other participants.

"We are very pleased that NCSA and the Alliance have selected WebEx for this evaluation. NCSA and the Alliance have people spread out across the country who need to collaborate regularly, and WebEx offers valuable services to enable different levels of collaboration," said Praful Shah, vice president of business development, at WebEx. "You can work on documents live over the Web and make changes in real time. It's a tremendous savings in time and in travel money."

So far, WebEx has been used by the Alliance's Partners for Advanced Computational Services (PACS) for meetings held to develop online training courses. Participants in the meetings used WebEx from their desktops at the Ohio Supercomputer Center, the University of New Mexico, NCSA, Boston University and the University of Kentucky. Using WebEx made it easier for the group to look at training materials at different Web sites and to work on updating and editing these materials.

The NCSA consulting office has put together a demo that shows how WebEx could be used for HPC consulting. "For HPC consulting, the chance to share the view of the user is especially useful," said Roy Heimbach of NCSA's consulting office. "Often, when I look at a problem directly, I see things the user didn't realize were important."

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