Announcement of Educause ICS meeting

["Enyeart, Michael J" <>]

Dear VoIP WG Members,

 

I am passing on this announcement for your information.  (I am a member of the ICS steering committee.)

 

-Mike Enyeart

Invitation to Attend the Educause Integrated Communications Strategies Working Group Meeting

 

This announcement is a reminder that the ICS summer meeting has extended an invitation to attend its next meeting to the EDUCAUSE community.  Funding for this event is provided by both EDUCAUSE/Net@EDU and the National Science Foundation.

 

Consistent with past years, our summer meeting will focus on conversations with vendors.  This year the ICS Working Group will be expanding the conversation to include both VoIP and Video over IP considerations. The ICS meeting will be held from Monday, June 17^th at noon until Tuesday, June 18^th at noon in Boulder.

 

Meeting Summary:

 

As before, the steering committee will prepare a number of questions for the vendors to answer as part of their presentations.  We have found this tactic to be highly useful as a way to focus vendor presentations and to optimally use the hour or so that we will allocate for each discussion.  If you plan to attend the ICS meeting and have a question or questions that you would like to be included in our communications to the vendors, please write to E. Michael Staman () or Jim Jokl ().

 

VoIP has evolved to production status in an increasing number of cases, and so at this meeting we plan to ask the vendors to discuss the successes and problems that they experienced as they deployed a major installation.  We are interested in large complex projects; practical experiences; issues such as the status of new applications, MCU integration, and unified messaging; how VoIP is being justified in replacement vs. new installation environments; and discussions on how VoIP is being positioned to integrate with Video over IP technologies and services.  The final selection of our three vendors has not been determined at this point, but companies such as Cisco, Nortel, and Avaya come to mind.

 

Then we wish to meet with three vendors offering products at the video infrastructure level.  The questions for these vendors will parallel those above.  Additionally, questions about items such as QoS, multicast, bandwidth management, and cable over IP will among those developed for these vendors.  What are their directions regarding various VoIP protocols?  And how to they plan to integrate with VoIP?  Again, the vendor list has not been fully determined, but companies such as RADVision, ClearBand, and VBrick are evolving as likely candidates. 

 

There is no registration fee for the meeting, and all members of EDUCAUSE are eligible to attend.  Registration information can be found at: http://www.educause.edu/asp/conf/meeting/registration.asp?meeting=ics02 and additional information about the program and the ICS Working Group can be found by navigating to: http://www.educause.edu/netatedu/events/ics02/ .