The Electronic Information Exchange System (EIES) has a long and rich history dating back to 1974 when Dr. Murray Turoff first came to NJIT from the President's Office of Emergency Preparedness (OEP). There he had developed the first computer conferencing system, EMISARY, for crises management and strategic planning. He brought to NJIT the dream of developing and evaluating Computer Mediated Communication technology to facilitate group decisions so that groups might act with their collective intelligence instead of the lowest common denominator. EIES was developed at NJIT's Computerized Conferencing and Communication Center (CCCC), where the current EIES work continues. With funding from the National Science Foundation, the original EIES utility was on-line in 1976. Dr. Starr Roxanne Hiltz, then a sociologist at Upsala College, led the controlled experimentation of on-line groups as the tools were developed to provide custom interfaces for each experiment and the various applications of the field trial groups. EIES innovated many interface concepts to promote usability and support end user tailoring. Since then thousands of individuals and hundreds of groups have utilized the original EIES and the new distributed Smalltalk based EIES (sometimes referred to as EIES 2). Members included futurists such as Alvin and Heidi Toffler and Stewart Brand. It was the basis for many later systems including Parti and The Well. The old centralized version of EIES ran at capacity for over a decade and evolved to include hundreds of interfaces and thousands of commands. Miserable response time and a now out of date character interface demanded that a new distributed EIES be developed.
EIES has been used for tasks ranging from Project Management to Electronic Marketplaces to Group Decision Support. Participants in the early evaluation of the technology included 3M, Digital Equipment Corporation, Exxon, IBM, Xerox, NASA, U.S. Army, U.S. Department of Commerce, IEEE and the American Productivity Center. CCCC's work in Computer Mediated Conferencing has resulted in numerous books, reports, and hundreds of professional publications dedicated to advancing the state of the art. CCCC continues to run an EIES utility at NJIT to provide organizations with the most up to date conferencing tools available. The Center's main objective is to develop new software and technology to research group communication applications.
Roxanne Hiltz brought the concept of a classroom without walls to the CCCC. With funding from the Annenberg/CPB Project, the Virtual Classroom ® (VC) was developed. Continued funding is being provided by the Sloan Foundation. In 1984, the New Jersey Office of Telecommunications and Information Services (OTIS) requested and funded the development of an enhanced EIES. With this funding, and funding from IBM and the New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology, NJIT began building the second generation EIES. Much of the dream of the new EIES with multimedia communications in a graphical interface is just beginning to be realized now. The new interface, uses the technology of the World Wide Web (WWW).
Although the EIES services will continue to be available in a text based, text only interface, EIES users should plan on moving to the new Mosaic multimedia interface this year. Users of IBM PCs and compatibles should plan on running Windows 3.1 on a 386 at 33 MHz or higher. MAC users should use a high end MAC running 7.0 or higher.
The EIES interface via WWW is currently available in a test mode. A full release version will be available to EIES users by November 1995.
NJIT has attained nearly 20 years of research and development of group systems. It's leadership in integrating computer-mediated communications and the World Wide Web can provide an Information Garden where EIES users may collaborate on a variety of issues while creating a hypermedia knowledge base to support total quality management in a variety of areas.
CCCC has produced a separate and distinct production EIES. Several iterations of testing and quality assurance have been conducted to isolate EIES users from the eccentricities of the experimental environment. CCCC is also working to provide better documentation and assistance to all users. The first and foremost among these improvement goals is 100% availability and reliability.
To attain these goals CCCC has made major changes in EIES and the CCCC organization:
A distinct production control process has been implemented. Production is managed by the university's administrative computing personnel to assure sound, round the clock, system support.
A computer systems manager has been assigned to all EIES systems to assure the reliability of the operating system of the computers on which EIES applications run.
EIES computer resources have been expanded to provide the speed and capacity necessary for the response required by corporate clients.
Forty-eight high speed (28,800 baud) and forty-eight 14,400 baud modems provide off campus dial-up access to the NJIT campus network. The NJIT Internet connection provides T1 access (1.5 megabyte per second). Low cost access to EIES is available to most users via their local Internet providers. Additional low cost access to users located in the 201 and 908 area codes is provided through Bell Atlantic's PDN. International access is also available via x.25 packet switched networks provided by various public data networks.
The CCCC programming staff has been increased to include a documentation specialist with experience in maintenance, documentation, and support of public information services.
A two-tier customer support plan is being implemented. If the first level staff cannot resolve a customer's problem, the problem is immediately assigned to second level support. The second level support is a team consisting of a network services manager, documentation specialist, computer systems manager, telecommunications analyst and senior EIES software developer.
An additional staff member was added and dedicated strictly to first level customer support and maintenance of user interface software.
In the ever expanding horizon of information systems technology, new EIES experimental interfaces are never put directly into a production ssytem. A number of steps are involved in the incorporation of new features into EIES:
The CCCC development team performs 'instance testing' on the new features.
A Q/A cycle is run on the new product using the entire CCCC staff with assistance from graduate student majors in computer science and other disciplines.
The system then goes through a 'test installation', and is used by the CCCC staff in their day-to-day operations.
The system is installed in the EIES student production environment (the Virtual Classroom), for use by hundreds of students, faculty, and staff.
A test client version is set up for acceptance testing by the client. (i.e., clients are given an opportunity to try out the new version before their groups adopt it.)
Upon approval of the client the new system is installed into the production environment for the client and user community.
Each step refines the product so that CCCC can provide a higher level of quality assurance than the industry standard method of a single Q/A cycle with an Alpha and Beta version.
The production EIES user base on all databases has increased 61% since April 1993.
Response time in the production environment has decreased 40%, to generally under 0.5 second under medium system load (15 to 25 users) during the same time period.
Scheduled system availability has increased an astonishing 115%. During the past 6 months unscheduled system outages totaled a mere forty minutes.
Membership in EIES is available for as little as $25 per month. Membership fees provide essential support for CCCC as we receive no base funding from NJIT. Your participation and collaboration with CCCC can help make the dream of the collective intelligence a reality. Groups large or small can use EIES to support their organizational coordination needs. Email info@eies.njit.edu or call 973-596-EIES (3437) for more information.