Collaboration environment

Collaboration is an important ingredient for research and development. Today, distributed teams with members coming from different institutions, cities, or even countries are rather a norm. Within our e-infrastructure we strive for providing tools for remote collaboration that enable coordinate activities of such teams while eliminating frequent travels.

Collaboration can take various forms. It can include collaboration on solving task using grids, data sharing in data storage, or communication via common tools such as electronic mail. In this section, we focus mainly on the virtual meeting, i.e. video and audio communication in real time among team members.

Virtual meetings

Consultations or coordination meeting may not require a physical presence of all participants at a single location, instead can be arranged virtually. Virtual meetings can be performed using two similar services that transmit video, audio and content among individual participants: videoconferences require specialized software or hardware clients and offer higher quality of video and audio channels, while webconferences’ advantage is that users need only a common web browser and have wider content sharing options.

Higher requirements can be fulfilled with specialized video transmissions where the video is transmitted in high quality (HD, 2K, 4K,8K) or stereoscopically (3D). The service is useful for transmissions from surgery operations or experiments at specialized conferences. We are also able to support streaming of presentations over the Internet. IP telephony for transmitting phone conversations over the network is an option for lower demands.

Authentication infrastructure

Team work usually requires data sharing and utilizing various network services and applications. To ease these activities we have created an authentication infrastructure that enables users easier access to shared resources. Its main part is the eduID.cz federation where users can use their home name and password for accessing services provided by other subjects, on a single sign-on principle.

The other service of our e-infrastructure for this area is issuing the certificates that verify the identity of individual servers and users. They offer better security for mutual communications.

Further services

Alongside the services listed above we offer several supplementary services for collaboration support such as videoarchive for archiving records from different events or videoconferences.

Last change: 18.9.2018