Marratech Manager, E-meeting Room Management

Creating e-meeting room templates
E-meeting rooms often share similar characteristics. For example, bandwidth limits, contact info and encryption algorithms often are similar from one meeting room to another.

In Manager 3.5, templates can be imported (examples can be found on www.marratech.com) and created. After creating and or importing templates, you will be able to create a new meeting room based on the template of your choice.

Importing templates

After logging in with administrative rights and selecting the Administration link, click on the E-meetings and select the Templates link on the top of the page. Select Import Templates.

Choose your template file by pressing the Browse button. From here, you can select your own template file or a template file downloaded from www.marratech.com.

A template file may contain one or more templates.

After pressing the Import button, you will receive a message similar to this:

"Successfully imported 4 templates from 'templates.ldif'!"

Press the Return button to continue and see the templates you have just imported.

Creating a template
After logging in with administrative rights and selecting the Administration link, click on the E-meetings and select the Templates link on the top of the page.

A the bottom of this page, you will find a Create New Template section and a "Name:" field. Enter the name for your new template and press New.

Add a description for your template, for example : "Basic Asymmetric DSL 230 kbps" and press Next.

Your are now prompted to decide if your template is to include all the media (audio, video, chat, whiteboard , web), all media but video (to save bandwidth) or Advanced, where you can choose exactly the media you require. Press Next.

Audio Codecs
Choose the default audio codec. A Marratech 5.0 and later client will ignore the chosen codec and select the one that fits the selected amount of bandwidth and the current network conditions. Older clients will read this setting and apply it.

Codec	Bandwidth	Compatibility	Comment
GSM	13 kb/s	All	Old codec. Use only for compatibility reasons. iLBC is better suited for low bandwidth usage.
iLBC	15 kb/s	4.0 and higher	High quality (8 kHz) low bandwidth codec. In Marratech, it is called "Low Bandwidth" in the Audio preferences. Recommended for (64 to 128 kbps uplink) low bandwidth DSL users.
iSAC	30 kb/s	4.0 and higher	High quality, medium bandwidth. This coded uses 16 kHz sampling. In Marratech, it is called "Medium Bandwidth" in the Audio Preferences. Strongly recommended for low and medium (128 kbps uplink) DSL users.
DVI4_8K	33 kb/s	All	Kept for compatibility reasons only. (For example, third party multicast tools.)
PCMU	64 kb/s	All	Has the same sampling rate as landline telephones. Kept for compatibility reasons.
iPCMWB	~ 80 kbps	3.4 and higher	Best quality and most robust codec available. Recommended for use in Premium DSL (256 kbps and higher uplink) and broadband.

Please choose the default audio codec carefully. DSL and Cable TV connections associated with home use often have slower uplink connections than download connections. Overloading a DSL or cable TV uplink may cause buffering in the DSL/Cable Modem causing delays, hacking voice and overall bad quality.

After having selected your audio codec carefully, press Next to continue.

Video Codec
You may choose between two video codecs. H.261 and H.264.

H.264 will give you a better image at lower bandwidth but was designed for Pentium IV 3GHz computers. Be careful not to use H.264 in a meeting where slower computers are present. You may cause them to overload and loose packets.

In most cases, H.261 is the codec to choose as it is low CPU and more robust to packet loss. Press Next.

Meeting Bandwidth
This step helps you set a bandwidth limit for your meeting room. You may choose to let the Manager decide the bandwidth limit for each media by setting a total limit and select "E-meeting total" or set the values independently yourself by selecting "Advanced (limit individual media)"

The bandwidth limit chosen represents the maximum amount of data sent to each client connected to the meeting room. This data originates from the other clients, thus the limit acts on the maximum each client may send.

Additionnaly, to avoid overloading the client's uplink connection, an additional send limit is set in the client's preferences. The first limit to to be reached is the one imposed.

Notes on setting bandwidth limits
Setting a bandwidth limit is an important step in building a template. While the "E-meeting total" setting and the defaults in the templates provided are recommended, the following information may be of use:

Video, whiteboard, chat and web traffic bandwidth limits are shared. Thus a 1 Mbps bandwidth limit for video in a 10 participant room will give a total of app. 100 kbps per user. (1 000 / 10 = 100 )

Congestion control may lower the limit automatically if packet loss is detected in the meeting room.

The bandwidth limiter acts on the total room bandwidth.

A 1 Mbps e-meeting room with 10 participants (using Unicast and no extra nodes) will create a 10 Mbps load on the server. 10 Mbps will be sent out to the participants (1 Mbps each) while 1 Mbps will be received (1 Mbps limit divided by 10)

For asymmetrical DSL and Cable connections, users will need to specify their uplink connection in the Marratech client options.

A client's own data is not sent back to the originator. However, the bandwidth calculation ignores this. This introduces a safety margin, useful in case of network overload created by an external factor.

When calculating bandwidth usage, make the following assumptions:

Only one written media will be used as it is hard to use the whiteboard and chat simultaneously. Choose the highest bandwidth limit between chat, whiteboard reliable, whiteboard best effort and web. ( 1 * wb )

Add in the full video bandwidth limit

Add in the full audio bandwidth limit

Bandwidth limit = (audio bandwidth limit) + ( highest written media bandwidth limit) + video bandwidth limit

The bandwidth limit is a soft, dynamic tool controlled by the clients. While it may seem complex, our experience is that setting only a total bandwidth limit and using the defaults is sufficient for most scenarios.

Meeting Bandwidth: E-meeting total
Setting the bandwidth limit total will set the limits for each media automatically.

Meeting Bandwidth: Advanced (limit individual media)
Using the advanced setting will let you specify limits for each individual media. Here is a description of the media:

Media	Used for	Comment
Audio	Voice	Bandwidth limits are dynamic. If too much audio is sent, thus overloading the limit, the codec will step down to a lower quaility automatically.
Video	Video	The video media normally is the biggest bandwidth user of all the media.The video limit is split evenly amongst the users sending video.
Control	Member Messages and Chat.	Does not use much bandwidth.
Web Slides	Used for pushing www slides by using the viewer.	When used to stream out HTML 4.0 slides, it uses bandwidth to stream the content (text and images) to the other participants. This tool is not used very often.
Whiteboard Reliable	Used for written information, final vector positions, slides and images and application sharing.	Usually the written media that uses the most bandwidth. Increasing or lowering this setting will affect the speed of the Whiteboard. This setting affects application sharing as well.
Whiteboard Best Effort	Used for free hand drawing intermediate positions, pointing and moving objects.	Does not use as much bandwidth as the reliable media.

Encryption
Here, you may set various options for encryption levels. Marratech always recommends using encryption when creating an e-meeting room or a template. Using encryption adds no noticeable lag or bandwidth usage.

Choose between:

*Default*	AES 256 bit encryption. Only for Marratech 5.0 and later clients. The server will create a temporary key and store it safely locally on the server.
*Compatibility Mode*	128 bit blowfish encryption. To be used when mixing Marratech 4.1 clients with 5.0 clients.
*Advanced*	To be used if you require the key to be stored on an external server. The latter may be very useful for further securing your network. To do so, place a text file (e.g. key.txt) behind an external ssl protected server and enter the URL when asked to. This is a good way of securing that no one (incl. meeting admins) can have access to any meeting information. SIP and H.323 will not work when this option is selected.
*None*	Only use if a third party multicast tool or network sniffing tool must be used. It is extremely unsafe to have unencrypted meetings on the Internet.

Seats Model
Depending on the permissions included in your license, the template you create can be applied to:

*All Seats*	The full capacity of your server (in terms of number of seats) will have access to the e-meeting rooms created from this template.
*Limited Seats*	A good feature for limitng bandwidth. Only a subset of the total amount of seats will have access to to the e-meeting rooms created with this template. For example, 5 seats out of a possible 10 may access rooms created with your template.
*Unlimited Seats*	If you have purchased one or more auditoriums, your template may be specified for Unlimited Seats. E-meeting rooms created with Unlimited Seats are auditoriums.

You may now Finish building your template to save it and use it to create an e-meeting room.

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