Web-based Collaboration with eReview

E-review is an on-line collaboration application, which allows you to chat and collaborate on 2D/3D drawings and many other formats like MS Word, Excel and PDF. These can be viewed as images and marked up with comments. This tool can be very useful especially for engineering and design organizations that work on heavy files and want to collaborate on their work.

The basic functionality is that of a chat applet and a Web-based whiteboard where different participants of an online meeting can present their ideas and work on images. The software also allows remote desktop capabilities, that is, users can work on each others desktops remotely once due permissions are obtained. This is done using VNC (Virtual Network Computing). It also has 3-D modeling capability for which users need to install Java 3D. 

The setup is a client-server one, where the software needs to be installed only on the server machine, and once the server is started, client machines can access the functionality through any Web browser (Netscape 6 and IE 6 recommended by vendor). The client needs Java Run-time Environment (JRE 1.3 and higher), which can be downloaded and installed from the e-review server. Whichever other components need to be installed are all shown on the main page of the application, making it rather convenient for the clients.

Once a meeting is started, the ‘chairperson’ can invite participants through e-mail. A meeting in progress can be passively viewed as well, and currently running meetings can be webcasted. By installing Java Media Framework, participants can even use audio/video in an e-review meeting. The application lets you open and view multiple documents at the same time. 

We ran the software on a 10 Mbps switched network, and found that it worked fine, except that it was slow at times. Sometimes we had to keep waiting for the result of some action we did and didn’t know about the error for quite some time.

The bottom line. A feature-rich utility that can be useful for organizations wanting to collaborate on their documents, especially drawings. 

Shruti Pareek