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 support group communication objectives.
In the mid-1980's Dr. Starr Roxanne Hiltz brought the concept of a classroom without walls into the CCCC. With funding from the Annenberg/CPB Project, the Virtual Classroom (VC) was developed. In 1984, the New Jersey Office of Telecommunications and Information Services (OTIS) requested and funded the development of an enhanced EIES. With this funding, 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 Mosaic is currently available in a test mode. A full release version will be available to EIES users by March 1995.
NJIT's nearly 20 years of research and development of group systems and 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.
Development System: One HP 835 configured with a 4 mip processor, 24 mbyte Main Memory and 1 gigabyte of disk capacity. An additional HP 825 configured with a 2 mip processor, 16 mbyte Main Memory and 500 megabytes of disk.
Operations and Development are on two physically separate systems. The Operational EIES is on the pair of HP 835's. The distributed nature of EIES design enables these two computers to act as one system with one computer serving as the database server and the other computer serving as the client server. EIES system response is in the 10 second time range with 10 or more users on line. Development is isolated on the remaining 835 and the 825.
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 computer 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 (14,400 baud) modems are currently installed with 48 more (28,800 baud) to be added by Fall 1995, the NJIT InterNet connection provides access at T1 speed (1.5 megabyte per second) and ADP AutoNet service has been added providing local, direct dial capability in most major metropolitan areas to improve access to EIES.
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 can't resolve a customer's problems, the problem is assigned immediately to second level support. The second level support is a team consisting of the Account Administrator, 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 maintain user interface software.
More improvements are planned:
All modems will be routed directly to the computer room, bypassing the NJIT switchboard in the next few months.
Two additional staff members will be added to the EIES staff to support additional enhancements, notably rapid deployment of the EIES Mosaic Interface and the incorporation of Enhanced Textual and SQL Search Capability.
In the ever expanding horizon of information systems technology new EIES experimental interfaces are never put directly on production. 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 more than 700 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 the production environment for the client and user community.
Each step refines the product; so 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 30 days unscheduled system outages totaled a mere forty minutes. This is significant in that the previous 30 days had 7.5 hours of unscheduled system outages, and the prior 30 days had significant outages - one of more than 24 hours.