Virtuality and Efficiency - Overcoming Past Antinomy in the Remote Collaboration Experience

Several recent initiatives have been put in place by the CERN IT Department to improve the user experience in remote dispersed meetings and remote collaboration at large in the LHC communities worldwide. We will present an analysis of the factors which were historically limiting the efficiency of remote dispersed meetings and describe the consequent actions which were undertaken at CERN to overcome these limitations. After giving a status update of the different equipment available at CERN to enable the virtual sessions and the various collaborative tools which are currently proposed to users, we will focus on the evolution of this market: how can the new technological trends (among others, HD videoconferencing, Telepresence, Unified Communications, etc.) impact positively the user experience and how to attain the best usage of them. Finally, by projecting ourselves in the future, we will give some hints as to how to answer the difficult question of selecting the next generation of collaborative tools: which set of tools among the various offers (systems like Vidyo H264 SVC, next generation EVO, Groupware offers, standard H323 systems, etc.) is best suited for our environment and how to unify this set for the common user. This will finally allow us to definitively overcome the past antinomy between virtuality and efficiency.