News Story

KMi Attends Isabel Global Info Day

Chris Valentine, Monday 12 Mar 2007

Peter Scott and Dr Paul Lefrere (senior lecturer in IET) attended two out of three sessions during Global Info Day, joining participants from a number of sites around the world including Madrid, Lima, Ottawa, Brussels and Budapest, to hear of and discuss projects that are part of the Seventh Research Framework Program. Framework programmes (FPs) have been the main financial tools through which the European Union supports research and development activities covering almost all scientific disciplines.

Isabel is a multipoint group collaboration tool running on PCs. Isabel implements a very effective floor and session control for real-time collaborations over the Internet were participants can be audiences in classrooms, auditoriums or meeting rooms, as well as indivuals sitting in front of their desktops. Isabel has been used for several years to perform various kinds of distributed activities.

Isabel, which runs only under Ubuntu Linux, represents quite a contrast to FlashMeeting (KMi’s own web-based conferncing software). Whilst offering application sharing (which is not possible under Flash) it is not cross-platform and requires a large number of specific ports to be open.