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Cross-campus meetings without leaving your office

10 August 2005

New software being tried by the university-wide CoolCampus initiative is enabling intercampus meetings and conferences to take place without participants having to leave their desks.

The Marratech software can be downloaded onto individual desktops and used by staff across Monash's eight campuses for meetings, lectures, conferences or communication between offices.

The program links offices via video and audio and provides virtual meeting rooms that staff can book for meetings. Each of the 'rooms' has a whiteboard and Powerpoint and note-taking capacities, all of which can be viewed by meeting participants.

Mr Paul Hii, from the CoolCampus initiative, based in the Faculty of Information Technology, said that as well as being used for administrative meetings, the program could be used for research collaborations and teaching.

"Users can use any headset, any computer and any webcam, -- it is a much cheaper way to communicate across campuses," he said. "It saves money in both travel costs and phone calls."

Associate Professor Arkady Zaslavsky, CoolCampus director and deputy director of the Monash Centre for Distributed Systems and Software Engineering, uses the software to keep in touch with his students while travelling overseas and to collaborate with his Swedish students while he is in Australia.

He also uses it to collaborate with researchers worldwide.

Dr Des Casey, from the Peninsula School of Information Technology, is using Marratech this semester for two online units, providing online sessions where students can 'drop in' for advice.

Pro vice-chancellor, campus coordination, Professor Phillip Steele, who has tried the system, said Marratech provided great potential for connecting the university's campuses.

"Video conference technology enables cross-campus and cross-country interaction in real time, and we have already used Marratech for campus coordination meetings among Monash campuses, including South Africa and Malaysia," he said.

Anyone interested in trialing the Marratech software should go to the Marratech Collaboration Solution website.