Desktop videoconferencing (DVC) users often refer to the 90/10 rule to describe DVC's value: Data sharing accounts for 90 percent of the information content, while talking-head video accounts for the remainder. But video drains about 90 percent of the price and bandwidth resources for DVC systems. Also, without video, data conferencing is POTS-friendly, another point in favor of cost consciousness.
Early collaborative software provided a static whiteboard visible to all conference participants. Data from documents and spreadsheets appeared on the whiteboard, and changes made during a session had to be reentered in the original application. Newer versions give collaborators a shared program window, and users can make changes within the program window via keyboard or mouse com
mands, even if only one system has the application installed.
Stand-alone data-sharing products today range in price from $50 to $200, depending on their feature set and support for multiple LANs and WANs.
Titles include
Farsite, from DataBeam, which is bundled with many voice-and-data modems, and TalkShow and Vis-a-Vis from FutureLabs. These compete against data-conferencing versions of full-blown videoconferencing applications.
Proprietary R.I.P.
The collaborative computing market is in the throes of two transitions. Customers are demanding solutions that comply with standards. The T.120 standards, first promulgated by the International Multimedia Teleconferencing Consortium and now submitted to the ITU, have been endorsed by virtually all conferencing vendors. This essentially ends the future for proprietary products.
DataBeam, which markets stand-alone software, is licensing T.120 technology to its erstwhile competitors and has signed up AT
&T, British Telecom, Microsoft, PictureTel, and VTel. IBM's Lakes architecture, middleware that allows multiple types of data streams to be serialized and synchronized across multiple hardware and software platforms, will also be compliant with T.120.
Equally important is the shift from data conferencing as a stand-alone application to an embedded OS technology. Future OSes will have an abstraction layer for real-time, multipoint, multimedia communications. Note Microsoft and PictureTel's plan to develop voice- and data-conferencing APIs for independent software vendors. The APIs will provide access to multipoint data communications capabilities based on T.120.
OS/2 already includes Person-to-Person software. The Mac OS uses the QuickTime Conferencing extension, a foundation used by Apple's Media Conference Application and by Crosswise's Face-to-Face software, a cross-platform document-conferencing solution.
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Data-sharing software, from DataBeam (top) and FutureLabs, lets workers collaborate on documents without the resource drain of live video.
Face Off
