Even better Avatar conferencing (behind the scenes look)
Avaya's web.alive service is designed from the start to be used in enterprises, and the new release just announced takes it beyond any other offer out there. This project has been operating in a sort of business incubator for a couple of years, and with this announcement Avaya is making it available both as a service and as licensed software.
As I pointed out back in June, it takes considerable engineering design to make these "Virtual Space" tools trivially easy to use, particularly for demanding business users. Walk around in http://avayalive.com and you'll find it to feel natural. They've added a lot of new features such as Desktop Sharing. This is a new space for me, and I'm learning a lot about the technical underpinnings needed to make this feel easy. This note digs a little below the surface on some of the new capabilities to give you a sense of the engineering required:
- User Startup Experience: The application feels a lot faster now. The team put a lot of focus on this. For example, they adopted LZMA Compression which creates environment packages that were about 30% smaller. And they've also adopted advanced multithreading for delivering, decompressing, and loading the application which takes advantage of network characteristics and also balances CPU cycles. All of this together helps get users get immersed into the environment twice as fast as before. And the neat trick is that while the previous setup caused users to wait until everything was done, much of the startup delay is now concealed by dynamic content presentation, and the user now perceives that they're entering the environment now in about 1/10th the time.
- Firewalls/Proxies: The security tools and proxy mechanisms deployed by enterprises are, thankfully, always improving. But this means applications need constant care to have it behave well in light of corporate firewalls. For example, this release includes support for Proxy Auto Configuration (PAC) files and better handles the situation where users have several proxy configurations on their PC. The team also added support for Single Sign-on in cases where a proxy uses Microsoft's NTLM authentication as well as handling the latest browser methods for managing proxy settings.
- Voice Quality: Because the audio mixer now leverages Stereo echo cancellation for every session, high quality wideband audio can be heard by any user - even those without a headset. For those of us who don't use a headset, the sound improvement is refreshing. You can really hear the 3D spatial audio (technology purchased by Nortel in 2008) that helps make it feel like you're sitting inside of the space. Also, they added a Quality meter showing how the network is impacting your voice. The meter combines several indicators including: packet loss, jitter, voice engine responsiveness, as well as CPU overhead.
- Effective Web Rendering: They rebuilt the web rendering engine leveraging WebKit. WebKit was built by Apple around 10 years ago and released as open source in 2005. It's great for building reliable applications to run within a browser and yielded many improvements including more reliable Adobe Flash viewing. A nice benefit from this is that users can now interact with web applications in a separate window - yet remain tied to the web.alive experience.
- Telephony Integration: Customers can now place a telephone in their virtual conference room for making calls, and you can use the phone to bridge in non-virtual participants. Web.alive treats it as if it's really in the space, so you hear 3D audio as if you were there. (That is, people closer to the phone are heard louder than people further away.) This telephony service is SIP-based and can leverage the native enterprise communications infrastructure for placing/receiving calls, call detail recording, etc.
Avaya's virtual conference center (http://avayalive.com) is available for you to visit, and there are always folks from the web.alive team there to answer your questions. I stop in to visit once in a while too. Maybe I'll see you there.
Posted 28 Sep 2010 at 09:24 AM