Reviews /
Meet me on the net
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White Pine Software's MeetingPoint serves up videoconferencing for CU-SeeMe clients, but don't plan a big rollout just yet.
By Lee Schlesinger
Network World, 3/9/98
Today, knowledge workers can practically live in their offices. With a stash of snacks, a comfy chair and a high-speed Internet link, the only thing forcing cubicle rats to leave their lair is an occasional meeting. You may be able to eliminate even that obstacle with White Pine Software, Inc.'s MeetingPoint Conference Server 3.0. MeetingPoint lets anyone with a cheap digital camera participate in group videoconferences without leaving his desk.
MeetingPoint supports not only clients running the vendor's Enhanced CU-SeeMe videoconferencing software, but also any client running the H.323 videoconferencing and T.120 teleconferencing protocols, including Microsoft Corp.'s NetMeeting.
But you probably won't want to put MeetingPoint on your CEO's desk just yet. A lack of administration tools and a clunky administrative interface make the product suitable only for sites where videoconferencing is not a mission-critical application.
Good intentions
The concept behind MeetingPoint is a good one. The MeetingPoint server acts as a host that enables clients to communicate over a network, either locally or via the Internet. Once connected, they can communicate with any combination of voice, video or text chat. In effect, it is a reflector that provides group conferencing, without which CU-SeeMe is just a point-to-point communication tool.MeetingPoint supports multiple conference servers (for sites with heavy conferencing loads) and multiple conferences per server.
To connect to a conference, users need to run a compatible client. A natural choice is White Pine's Enhanced CU-SeeMe, or any other version of CU-SeeMe including the original developed by Cornell University.
Because it supports T.120 conferencing, any T.120 client also can connect to a MeetingPoint conference. But because of the immaturity of software that supports T.120, T.120 clients can only see other like T.120 clients. Don't expect full-motion 30 frame/sec video when many participants are logged on to a conference. We were lucky to get 1 frame/sec most of the time. Clients can limit their send and receive rates, which helps lighten the load on the server but makes for an even worse viewing experience.
Three paths to administration
There also are several ways to impose limits on the server side. An administrator can control bandwidth usage and define client access to conferences as well as set up billing information and perform housekeeping on product parameters.There are three ways to administer MeetingPoint. The easiest is simply to edit the program's configuration file. The file betrays the program's origins; it looks like a list of Unix commands - cryptic pseudo-words with parameters preceded by a hyphen. You also can telnet in to the server to make configuration changes. If you choose to go either of these routes, be sure to have the documentation at your side.
A more comprehensible approach is to use the software's built-in Web-based interface. From any Java-capable browser, you can access a graphical interface that enables you to change the most important parameters of the product. For example, you can add, edit and remove conferences, set passwords for conference participants and change the messages people see when they log on to the server or a conference.
Because the administrative applets are written in Java, they're slow. And because they run within a browser, they lack the sophistication of a stand-alone program. Administrative pages are simply HTML tables, so you can't, for instance, get any information by clicking the right mouse button.
Our biggest regret, however, is the lack of monitoring tools built in to the server. We wouldn't expect to archive voice and videoconferences, but you can't even keep a log of the chat sessions that conference participants type to each other. You can log the times users logged in to and out of each conference, but the log file can't be browsed from the graphical administrative interface. You can see a list of users currently logged in, but the display is not dynamically refreshed, meaning a list snapshot taken five minutes ago may be totally out of date unless you do a manual refresh.
Installation and documentation
At least MeetingPoint is easy to install. A single CD-ROM lets you install MeetingPoint on a server running Windows NT Server 4.0 or Sun Microsystems, Inc.'s Solaris 2.5. You need a fast server with at least 64M bytes of memory and a speedy network interface card because videoconferencing puts a heavy demand on server CPU, memory and network subsystems.White Pine's single volume of documentation is half user's guide, half reference appendix that comprehensively details the product's many configuration options.
In our view, MeetingPoint is fine for low-end videoconferencing, but it's not ready to be a vital tool for corporate use.
In order for it to hit the big time, White Pine needs to upgrade its administrative features, add an administrative tool that doesn't rely on Java and a Web browser and incorporate a more detailed log of conference activity. Until then, it looks like most workers will still have to leave their offices on occasion. Maybe that's not such a bad thing.
