Book Review and References: Cisco TelePresence Fundamentals - Szigeti, McMenamy, Saville, Glowacki - Cisco Press ISBN - 1-58705-593-7
You always like to begin by saying what you like and then give a critique of what is missing or could be improved upon. First of all, this is a "must-have book" on video teleconferencing aka telepresence. The chapters on room planning and design are beyond anything ever presented before and critical for anyone pursuing teleconferencing. Specifically, like the joke "it's the economy, stupid," in teleconferencing design, "it's the room, stupid." Moreover, when you talk about room issues, you don't start with lighting but noise. The book is worth it alone on these following few sentences. "Ambient noise is everywhere and generated by numerous things. Take a moment to pause and listen to the background noises around you." (page 277) They also mention the cars and buses though they forgot to mention jet airplanes but they drive the point home to "use a Sound Pressure Level meter to measure the level of ambient sound within the room." They could have added to measure the room at different times of the day, week, etc. You get the point that they have thought through a lot of the complex issues and have specific recommendations, not just fluff. The book is technically sound covering a vast array of issues including router, LAN, firewall and network design.
Now for some minor comments, first, the book totally lacks anything on "driver training." In that light, while they mention AT&T's Picturephone, they didn't mention AT&T's Picturephone Meeting Service which was a room-to-room nationwide service or AT&T's "Gemini" blackboard system. In addition, they forgot NEC's "rollabout" video conferencing system. In addition, there are hundreds of other examples of technologies and user systems that were tried and failed. Lastly, they didn't do their homework when it comes to why so far telepresence has failed. In my 1985 book, we have forecasts from a number of the major research firms that suggest that the teleconferencing business would be more than $8 billion by 1990 (in 1980 dollars), that penetration of teleconferencing in U.S. alone businesses would reach 90% by 1995 and there would be "full integration into the work environment by 1990." For thirty years I have been saying that people need "driver training" on effective video communications for it to get widespread executive level use. In other words, having a great mechanic is critical but knowing how to drive the car is even more critical to success. However, telepresence and/or teleconferencing is still "stuck in the mud." As I have mentioned on many other occasions, Hal Josephson who pioneered the concept of "mediasense" which is a more relevant term than telepresence and created and delivered many courses on helping executives understand their own sense of media. His simple comment rings true today as it did thirty years ago, "if you are boring face-to-face, you will still be boring via electronic conferencing." As I would tell John Chambers, changing the name from teleconferencing to telepresence doesn't really show understanding the need to help users understand their own presence. Buy the book but unless there is ongoing, indepth training, realize telepresence will continue to fail.
There are some resources below but you can certainly you use Cisco's telepresence system, Microsoft's "Roundtable" small group "geek video" system sold to Polycom and renamed CX5000 as well as other great Polycom products.
Resources:
Video Teleconferencing systems (or use search engine, all the sites mentioned below are too complicated)
Polycom - www.polycom.com
Cisco - www.cisco.com
AT&T - www.att.com/enterprise
Training
Media Sense - www.mediasense.org
Virginia Ostendorf - www.vaostendorf.com
Web conferencing
Webex - www.cisco.com
Qwest - http://qwest.conferencing.com
Gotomeeting - www.gotomeeting.com
Search engines - Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, etc.
Technorati
Del.icio.us
Slashdot
Digg
twitter
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