[Videoconferencing] Transition from EVO to Seevogh Research Network, January 8th

[Andrew Daviel]

As many of you have probably heard, the "free" EVO videoconferencing 
service is being replaced by a "not free" version called SeeVogh.
I had been asked to hold off on this announcement until we knew more, and 
besides, not all the details were known. They still aren't.

Basically, CERN decided to stop funding EVO and instead partner with the 
commercial service Vidyo (https://vidyoportal.cern.ch/, http://www.vidyo.com/).
The EVO maintainers then decided to take EVO commercial, and created a 
company "Evogh, Inc." to do so. EVO is splitting into two - a commercial 
cloud-based service on https://seevogh.com/, and the original research 
community service on http://research.seevogh.com/, using the EVO Panda 
servers and audio gateways (including the ones at TRIUMF).

Sometime soon (Monday Jan 7th, maybe) the open "Universe" community will 
go away. Only funded communities will remain. Only authorized users will 
be able to create meetings. TRIUMF has agreed to fund the existing 
"TRIUMF" community. Some experiments such as T2K have also funded 
communities.

Each meeting can support up to 5 guests, who need not be community 
members. So once a meeting is started, anyone can be invited - there is no 
need for individual users to seek funding.


The EVO client (Koala) is being replaced by a new SeeVogh client, launched 
from http://research.seevogh.com/. The existing Koala (launched from 
http://evo.vrvs.org/evoGate/) will continue to work on the research 
network until "at least" June 2013.

In theory, anything that can run EVO can run Seevogh (Java required). As I 
write, there is an issue with the video capture on the room systems at 
TRIUMF, but hopefully that will be resolved.

See http://research.seevogh.com/faq-transition2013.html


Authentication for the TRIUMF community (to be used 
only for TRIUMF-related conferences) will initially be by a shared 
password. More details will be available later.



-- 
Andrew Daviel, TRIUMF, Canada
Tel. +1 (604) 222-7376  (Pacific Time)
Network Security Manager