How we did it

By Christine Perey
Network World, 09/10/01

We evaluated the participants in two ways. First, we solicited responses to a PEREY-developed request for proposal (RFP) to thoroughly assess what the vendor offers, and the costs associated with such product or service. The same standard RFP was sent to each participant upon acceptance of the Network World invitation to participate. With the exception of Pictron, which reports that as a ready-to-use application out of the box it does not prepare formal proposals, companies evaluated in this review responded as if in a competitive bid situation.

In the hands-on phase of testing, we invited the four vendors to deliver to the same facility a complete solution, including all hardware and software components as would be installed on a customer's premise and connected to a customer's LAN. Laptops, running Windows 2000 and Office 2000, were on the same subsegment of the enterprise network. Vendors had the option to install any software on the laptops needed for full evaluation of their systems. We had two Dell Pentium III laptops connected to the Polycom corporate LAN via a 6-port 10/100 router and 100M bit/sec interfaces. EMotion's solution all fit on one Pentium III server connected to the LAN via 10M bit/sec Ethernet. MediaSite's solution ran on a Dell dual 800MHz Pentium III server connected to the LAN via 10M bit/sec Ethernet. The Rich Media Application Server was installed on a 450MHz PC (minimum requirement is 200MHz machine for this component). Convera's solution was installed on two dual Pentium III servers and operated without being connected to the LAN due to IP addressing and software "keys" (i.e., licenses) issues encountered during set up.

A card catalog for your multimedia
Why IT should care
Considering multisite collaboration
The services alternative
NetResults

Each vendor was given two hours for demonstrations of capabilities and user training. The following day, the four-member evaluation team used the systems to set up a project, ingest media, perform searches and collaborate on the review of assets proposed for use in a simulated product launch.

Each vendor was scored for how the system was appropriate for use in a networked enterprise scenario. During testing, ease of use assessments (based on user interface design, use of wizards, clarity of online help features, etc>) were made for each of four key steps in the workflow:

Media acquisition -- ingesting corporate content in .AVI and Microsoft Windows Media (.WMF) format from CD-ROMs, to represent different applications, departments or procedures.
Organization -- how the system approaches (or allows the archiver to build) business classification schema, access media anywhere in a network, or even secondary or tertiary storage.
Searching/viewing -- how the system supports searching the archives (options for browsing assets, navigating thumbnails and earmarking assets)
Publication -- creating custom Web-ready products on the fly, on a recurring or on-demand basis.

We also assessed each systems media acquisition accuracy, flexibility and stability. Finally, we wish to acknowledge the assistance of Jim Harper, HarperMedia, as a member of the evaluation team, of Aaron Read of ITworld.com and Michael Pendleton of Cap Gemini for providing sample digital content, and of Polycom, Inc., which generously and graciously hosted the vendors and evaluation team during three-days of on-site training and testing.

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