Shared environments
For online collaboration and innovation, the University subscribes to a collaborative work site called Sakai@Melbourne.
Sakai@Melbourne is a powerful platform supporting research collaboration at the University of Melbourne. Supported collaboration tools include forums, wikis, portfolios and other web-based tools to distribute resources and documents.
Who can use Sakai?
University of Melbourne researchers and their project team members, postgraduate students, and professional staff, are all able to set up a site in Sakai using their Unimelb email login details. The site leader can invite individuals from other institutions into their Sakai sites. Click here to get started with Sakai.
Who uses Sakai now?
Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative
Metabolomics Australia
EVO
The EVO (Enabling Virtual Organizations) System (http://evo.caltech.edu)
is based on distributed architecture. The primary objective of EVO is to provide a service to researchers that meets their requirements for usability, quality, scalability, and adaptability to a wide range of working environments, reliability and cost. The EVO infrastructure automatically adapts to the prevailing network configuration and status, so as to ensure that the collaboration service runs without disruption. EVO can perform end-to-end monitoring, including the end-user's computer as well as the network infrastructure, allowing problem resolution automatically and transparently on behalf of the user.
The EVO Client (called Koala) is based on Java and runs on the three main operating systems used by the scientific community: Windows, Linux and MacOS. Some of EVO's features and functions are:
- Instant messaging functions and presence information (i.e. available, busy, ... )
- Private or group chat during a meeting
Meetings-by-invitation, ad-hoc meetings, booked meetings, and permanent meetings - Playback and recording functions including video, audio, whiteboard, Instant Message, Chat.
- Shared files, high resolution sharing of any screen area, and whiteboard functions
- Support for several standard videoconferencing protocols.
- Automatic Time Zone adjustment and Multi-Language support (English, French, Slovak, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Finnish, and Chinese)
- Firewall-friendly and support for Network Address Translation
- End-to-End encryption of all the media (video/audio/chat/IM/ ...)
- A new video application based on OpenGL where all the live video windows and other objects are embedded in, and may move in a three dimensional space. (This application is currently available on Windows only; support for other operating systems will follow.)
- A integrated telephone gateway allows users to join an EVO meeting through the normal phone system.
To register and start using EVO, go to EVO @ AU http://evo.arcs.org.au/evoAU/
Skype
Skype is a software application that allows users to make voice calls over the Internet. Calls to other users of the service and, in some countries, to free-of-charge numbers, are free, while calls to other landlines and mobile phones can be made for a fee.
Skype allows users to communicate by both voice, and more traditional textual instant messaging. Voice chat allows both calling a single user and conference calling. Skype's text chat client allows group chats, emoticons, storing chat history, offline messaging and (in recent versions) editing of previous messages. Additional features include file transfer and video conferencing.
To download Skype, go to www.skype.com/download