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CIO Executive Council

A Peer-Advisory Service and Professional Association for CIOs

Webcast: In the Google Apps Cloud: How to Achieve Your Business Objectives

Dec 3rd, '09, 1 - 2 pm US/Eastern (GMT-5)

Join Council member Brent Hoag, Director, Global IT, at JohnsonDiversey, as he discusses the adoption of Google Apps which has helped meet four corporate goals; sustainability, simplification, increased employee productivity and global collaboration.

Webcast: Collaboration Initiatives: Benchmarks & Best Practices

Dec 15th, '09, 4 - 5 pm US/Eastern (GMT-5)

Join Council members Ruth Thorpe, VP & CIO at the U.S. Pharmaceutical Operations of Sanofi-Aventis, and Gary Kuyper, CIO at Bethany Christian Services, as they speak about their collaboration initiatives and experiences in how and why they chose the social networking and collaboration tools they are using and their business goals for collaboration, and facing culture change challenges.

Data Overview: Collaboration Initiatives Field Guide: Benchmarks & Best Practices

This appendix to the Council Field Guide provides an analysis which discusses benchmarks for collaboration IT implementation costs, adoption rates and payoffs. The overview identifies top IT and business goals and satisfaction rates for collaboration initiatives as well as best practices and lessons learned for implementing collaboration IT.

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News Feature

U.S. Gov't Offers Grid Computing Toolkit

A new open-source software toolkit is available Tuesday to improve remote online scientific collaboration via grid computing.The Access Grid Toolkit ...

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August 23, 2006 — CIO —

A new open-source software toolkit is available Tuesday to improve remote online scientific collaboration via grid computing.

The Access Grid Toolkit from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory enables development of programs to share video, audio, data and text for real-time collaboration between people at different locations around the world.

The technology makes it possible for doctors to diagnose a patient thousands of miles away, students to learn a lesson from an instructor or researchers to collaborate on a project remotely.

This is the third version of the toolkit, supporting wall-sized display technology, detailed visualization of simulations, a streamlined user interface and other improvements. Since first being offered, the toolkit has been downloaded more than 20,000 times in 56 countries.

Access Grid is written in the Python programming language and features more "robust middleware" than the previous version, making it easier for software developers to write applications to run on Access Grid, said Thomas Uram, technical lead for the Access Grid effort with the Futures Laboratory at Argonne.

In addition, the new version employs some of the most common Internet protocols in use, including secure socket layer for security, FTP for data transfer, the Jabber instant-messaging platform and XML for describing data.

The increased bandwidth afforded by grid computing and the improved interactive features of the software enhance the collaborative environment even when collaborators are miles or even oceans apart, said Uram.

"Interrupting works, arguing works" to advance research, said Uram. "We see things that can happen when people are comfortable communicating with each other."

InSORS Integrated Communications has developed commercial applications based on the open-source toolkit, said Jim Miller, president of the research and education sectors within inSORS.

"What I’ve seen is that it improves the stability and usability of the system," said Miller of the latest upgrade. "There are more controls so you can bring in more people, share more software applications and have a more robust experience."

By using grid computing architecture, multiple servers in different locations can "share the load balance" during a session, he said.

One of inSORS’ applications is at a National Institutes of Health research program on allergies and infectious diseases. Participants can collaborate from any of 10 regional research centers and eight to 10 universities around the country, he said.

Argonne National Laboratory, which is managed by the University of Chicago for the DOE’s Office of Science, conducts basic and applied scientific research.

-Robert Mullins, IDG News Service (San Francisco Bureau)

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