What is Centra Symposium?

ACT owns a 40-seat license for Centra Symposium (Centra for short), a powerful conferencing tool capable of supporting live online sessions of hundreds of participants. These highly interactive sessions can include:

• Variety of content, from Powerpoint slides, to Web pages, to whiteboards, to live application demos.
• Voice communication via high-quality, low bandwidth, multipoint Internet audio (VoIP)
• Live video stream of the presenter
• Polling/testing of participants
• Breakout sessions, with participants working in smaller, separate groups for a while before rejoining the main event
• Ability to instantly turn any participant into a presenter
• Recording of live sessions (including audio and video) for on-demand playback
• Instant feedback with visual indications of agreement/disagreement, applause, laughter, request to speak

What can Centra Symposium be used for? Let your imagination and your needs be your guide, but just to give you a glimpse at what's possible, we have been using Centra (and similar tools) in intercontinental courses involving universities in the United States and in South Africa; for recording/archiving live sessions and making them freely accessible via the Web; for delivering online training and mini workshops; for special, one-time events and lectures, including an expert presentation on anthrax to hundreds of health care providers across Wisconsin. Centra can certainly be applied to all these uses, and more, as it is likely the most powerful and flexible tool of its kind currently available.

How can you get it?

We are happy to offer this tool to other units and groups at U of M, but because of very high cost of licensing it we have decided to charge a nominal fee for the use of Centra, in order to recover at least our ongoing cost of maintaining the server. To make it easy to calculate, the charges are based on a block of "10 users per hour", in $50 increments. Here are some sample costs of Centra sessions:

• 1 hour (or shorter) session with 10 (or fewer) participants : $50
• 1.5 hour to 2 hours session with 10 (or fewer) participants : $100
• 2.5 hours to 3 hours session with 11-20 participants : $300
• 1 hour (or shorter) session with 31-40 participants : $200
• 2.5 hours to 3 hours session with 10 (or fewer) participants : $150

Considering that Centra's IP audio replaces phone conferencing while offering much more, these charges are really nominal, and in most cases will be less than charges for phone conferencing alone. Moreover, ACT's partners and affiliates will not be charged for the use of Centra and we may waive charges for others, on a case-by-case basis. Since the licenses are for concurrent users, the availability of the server may be limited at times, when all 40 connections are utilized. Please schedule your sessions in advance to avoid conflict.

If you'd like to have a demonstration of Centra, whether on-line or on-site, simply give me (Vlad Wielbut) a call at 647-8038 or send me an e-mail message via wlodek@umich.edu and I will be happy to schedule a demo.

Technical requirements for participating in Centra Symposium sessions:

(Some of it appears highly technical, but don't be put off by that: most users never have to worry about things like JVM version or port numbers.)

1. Centra client runs only on Windows (95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP). The vendor promises to port it to the Mac platform, but who knows when (and if) this will happen. Centra works - to some extent - in Virtual PC, but brace yourself for some frustration if you want to try..
2. Microsoft Java Virtual Machine must be present on the user's machine - build (version) 4.00.2339 or newer. To check the version of Java on your computer, simply bring up the command (DOS) window and type "jview". Notice the build number that shows up.
3. Centra client installs itself automatically via MSIE and ActiveX or "manually", from downloaded executable. For the automatic installation to work, users must be able to install to C:\Program Files (or some other directory) and to write registry keys to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. ActiveX should also be enabled in the browser. If this is problematic (e.g. on "locked down" machines in computer labs), client installations must be done "manually" by administrators..
4. Users' machines must be equipped with sound cards, headphones (or at least speakers), and good quality microphones. A webcam is recommended but not necessary.
5. At least a 56k modem connection is recommended, although Centra will work on 28.8k connections
6. Where firewalls are present, efforts should be made to open port 1709 for Centra traffic. Centra server can re-route its communication via port 80, but with significant loss of performance.

Prepared by Vlad Wielbut, updated October 2004