[Building Sakai] Live Virtual Classroom tool added to contrib

[John Bush]

rSmart is happy to announce the contribution of the Live Virtual  
Classroom tool.  For more information see confluence link and info  
that follows:

http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/LVC/Live+Virtual+Classroom+Tool

About the tool

The Live Virtual Classroom Tool (LVC) was originally developed in 2006  
for Sakai 2.2 as part of engagement between Mesa Community College  
(MCC) and rSmart. Since that time MCC has agreed to open source the  
code, and rSmart has ported the code forward to 2.6.

The tool is not intended to be single integration with only  
Elluminate. The front end is sufficiently separated from the backend  
to allow for integrations with other webcasting tools by simply  
swamping out the service level implementation. Those wishing to extend  
the functionality need only to extend VirtualClassroomServiceImpl and  
re-implement the communication layer with the external webcasting  
tool. We hope to provide support for Adobe Connect in the near future  
using this mechanism.

The Ellumiante integration provided in the Live Virtual Classroom tool  
differs from the integration Unicon has done, that work can be found  
here, http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/ELLUM/Home. The  
Unicon work is for Elluminate's hosted offering, the LVC tool supports  
the standalone server offering. Sorry, I forget the marketing names  
for these two things.

Features and Screenshots

    1. Schedule one time or re-occurring meeting from within Sakai.
    2. Edit and delete scheduled meetings and recordings.
    3. Automatic creation of moderator users in Elluminate. Not  
necessary for just participants, this is Elluminates recommendation.
    4. Join active meetings from within the Sakai tool
    5. Watch recordings of past meeting from within the Sakai tool
    6. Filter and sort lists of meetings and recordings from within  
the Sakai tool
    7. Ping Elluminate server - handy feature to check configuration  
and status between the servers.

The CLE maintains a list of what meetings are associated with what  
Sakai sites, so users of different sites only see and manage their  
specific meetings.

Video Demonstration

For a screencast demo of the tool go here, http://www.screencast.com/users/johnbush/folders/Jing/media/0f7ede7d-eb14-4f4e-b2d7-b46b111f7eaa

John Bush
Development Manager
rSmart