Evaluating Lecture Capture Solutions: Understanding Your Total Cost of Ownership

Hello, welcome to our continuing series of live

webinars documenting creative use of

Mediasite around the world.

My name is Sean Brown and I'm the vice president of

education for Sonic Foundry.

Today's webinar is entitled, Evaluating Lecture Capture

Solutions: Understanding your Total Cost of Ownership.

Once again, we have a lot of people joining us today.

I'm very excited.

At the time we went on the air we had about 250 people

joining us from all around the world.

I'll be quick, but we have people from universities and

education institutions in every single state of the

United States and in every single province in Canada.

At least one from each province and at least one from

each state.

I like that, full house.

We also have a significant number of people joining us

around the world who we'd like to also recognize and welcome,

including institutions from India, Iran, Italy, Germany,

New Zealand, Egypt, Ireland, Scotland, Norway, and France,

all at the time we went on the air.

So good evening, good morning, all that stuff.

Thanks for joining us live.

Before I introduce a guest, I just want to give you some

quick housekeeping.

I will be the moderator for today's presentation, and

during the presentation if you have a question that you'd

like me to relay to our guest, in the interface near the

video, you'll see something that looks

like a speech bubble.

It is a dialog button where if you click on that button,

you'll get a form where you can type in a question.

I will receive it here in the studio and at the appropriate

time I'll introduce your question to our guest.

Also in the interface near the video, you'll see links.

Things that look like links in a chain put together.

This contains supplementary information about today's

presentation, including the actual PowerPoint slides of

the prepared remarks that our presenter will be sharing that

she's been gracious enough to allow you to download.

And I think you're going to find them useful because

today's topic is one of the most common questions that I

get asked in my travels around the world.

What are the best practices or some suggestions that you can

share about how to go about evaluating the various lecture

capture offerings out there in the world today?

Nobody has done this better than our guest, who I'd like

to introduce.

Ms. Deirdre Jones.

Ms. Deirdre Jones is the interim assistant director and

an instructor in the Edward H.

Schmidt School of Professional Sales in the College of

Business Administration at the University of Toledo, the

number one professional sales program in the country.

DePaul University's Best Practices Research Program at

Center for Sales Leadership recognized

them as such in 2009.

Deirdre holds an MBA from the University of Toledo in

information systems, and also a bachelor in business

administration from the University of Toledo in

marketing, with a professional sales emphasis.

She's trained almost 900 students and working

professionals, primarily on sales education, as well as

other topics.

Deirdre planned, designed, and launched the technology in the

quarter million dollars ESSPS sale suites that is also in

use in other areas of the college.

She develops professional sales curricula, manages

outreach initiatives, publishes sales research, and

has recently become a key advisor and friend to all of

us at Sonic Foundry.

Thank you very much for joining us here at

headquarters in Madison, Deirdre.

Thank you, Sean.

And just hit them with your prepared remarks.

Wonderful.

Well I definitely want to echo what Sean said and appreciate

everyone joining in today.

And hearing that, wow, 250 individuals from all the

different states and a lot of different countries, and

really not surprised on that because this is a topic we

even coach our students on, is understanding how the

particular product or service that you're looking at and how

that fits into the total cost of ownership in the realm of

everything you're trying to accomplish.

So welcome today.

Just a little bit of background, quick, on the

University of Toledo just because I know sometimes

higher education institutions-- we're into

benchmarking.

And so we're looking at how big is the university?

The University of Toledo has approximately 21,000 students.

We have over 10 different colleges and over 250

different undergraduate, graduate, and working

professional degree programs. I'm specifically in the

College of Business Administration.

We have about 3,300 students in the College of Business

Administration and 11 different majors that our

students can major in.

And professional sales is just one of them.

So that's a little bit about the University and the College

of Business.

I think the first thing that you need to ask yourself and

all of you that are here today watching, there must be

something, some reason, some catalyst, behind why you're

even evaluating lecture capture

solutions to begin with.

And so understanding what you're even capturing in the

first place, why you're doing it, who's the audience that's

going to watch it, and frankly, why would they care?

When we talk to our students, we always talk to them about,

every time you open your mouth you have to be

thinking, so what?

And so those things are important.

And we would also encourage you and things that were

important to us was looking at all the different aspects of

your mission.

At the University of Toledo, we have a three part mission:

learning, discovery, and outreach.

And when we looked at those three parts we wanted to make

sure we could find a solution that would help us elevate our

programming as such.

And lecture capture obviously, just plays

into learning aspect.

But when you look at a lecture capture solution, typically

there are other types of applications that will branch

out into the engagement and then also the discovery

aspects as well.

I'm the one here today doing the presentation, but I'm here

today because of a team of individuals back at the

University of Toledo.

You cannot be a cowboy or cowgirl and get this. done.

It's just not going to happen.

And you need to make sure that you're integrating people from

the line of business side, the functional leads, and then

because in most cases, they are the decision-makers.

And then there's also the technical aspect of

what's going on.

And so involving the IT team.

Because ideally, this should be a joint team effort.

You'll notice I've got a little baseball picture up

there and there's a sales author, a trainer, consultant,

Dave Kahle, and he uses the baseball analogy and says, if

you're not even talking to the right people, you're not at

the plate and you don't even have a chance to hit the ball.

And what I'm hoping to do today is help you have an

opportunity to hit the ball.

And actually be able to knock it out of the park like we've

been able to.

And so when you're looking at your functional lead, your

college administrators, center directors, or other

individuals, there's a lot of new revenue streams that you

could be treating using a lecture capture solution.

It's called lecture capture, but I always try and emphasize

"and the beyond" aspect of it.

And there's a lot of talent and a lot of things that

people at your university are probably doing every day, and

possibly even right now.

And those interactions could be streamed live to expand

audiences, improve branding for the university, and then

also turn those into new, repeatable

revenue streams as well.

It also helps you differentiate in the

marketplace, which is another thing.

I believe there is very low percentage of higher education

institutions even doing lecture capture

in the first place.

And so continuing to move on that first mover advantage is

going to be important.

There's lots of us that are increasing our fees and

tuition for our students.

And I think recognizing that the students in the business

community, they are our customers.

And so finding ways to justify those increases, obviously

some better internal coordination.

Faculty will like the system as well.

Improve student outcomes.

We started initially looking at Sonic Foundry

for role play capture.

Our role play capture started over 10 years ago.

When we started the program we had a VHS camcorder on a

tripod in an over-sized supply cabinet.

And now we have a quarter million dollar suite of rooms

run with Sonic Foundry's webcasting and knowledge

management, and a variety of other pieces as well.

But it's enabled us to better coach our students, help them

understand what we expect from them when it comes to

professional selling.

And then as painful as it might be for them, we make

them watch the tape.

And they have to do self-assessment and they do

peer critiques.

There's coaching role plays, information gathering,

proposal, presentation.

And then obviously, as a faculty member,

we watch it as well.

It's also a useful tool that we're also providing to our

business community as well.

Obviously, it lets you substitute for yourself when

you get sick, get speaker flexibility.

And on the technical side of things, it's a great way for

your technical team to highlight and reinforce to the

university and the college their importance and the

integral role that technology does play in better serving

our students and the business community.

So who doesn't want to continue to look good?

It also helps them save time with some of the automation

that can go in.

And obviously, it's going to be easy for the end users

because a lot of these solutions

are very user friendly.

After we discussed what our catalyst for change is, we

needed to come up with our business requirements.

And the way I have this particular slide laid out is

on the left-hand side I have what our business

requirements were.

And I think it's important that we do this because you

don't want to turn any buying situation or investment

situation into a feature checklists.

But obviously, you need to have the features there

because obviously, they provide the benefits.

So on the left we have different requirements that

we're interested in.

And then across from that, the specific feature we were

asking vendors about.

Just to take a couple of them, being able to immerse the

audience as if they were attending in person.

And in order to do that, much like we're doing today, is a

live stream.

And that level of intimacy and excitement is definitely going

to be important.

But also the ability to improve that

as-if-you-were-there experience by having the

media, like your PowerPoint slides or whatever you're

doing on the computer, integrated and synchronized

with the video and audio of the talking head.

That's important.

Also, interactivity features that they

might be able to provide.

That way people can ask questions, take polls, and

obviously, you can continue to direct and facilitate

conversations with things like presentation links.

There are other things.

And I know Sean and I are going to have some Q&A time at

the end, but there's other requirements that we have in

terms of portability, the flexibility, the availability,

to quickly and effectively and securely share content.

Because the content management piece of this is huge.

One of the things we quickly discovered is that we have a

lot of options.

And obviously, in the technology area, things are

constantly changing.

Almost a little bit faster than what we would care to see

them change from time to time.

But basically, there's three different paths that you can

go down once you decide to do lecture capture.

We have desktop tools, software only,

and appliance based.

And you could probably do a whole other webinar on what

the differences are between these different paths.

But fundamentally, for us because we were looking to

have something that had a full-blown content management

solution because we were sharing with students and the

business community, and even with the students, we were

sharing across different sections, different classes of

students because of our integration.

That was important to us.

The ability to scale up.

Part of why we were even able to do our new professional

sales lab is the fact that our College of Business

Administration recently launched a $15.4 million

addition to the College of Business Administration.

And so because of that, we have 10 state of the art

classrooms, 5 action learning labs.

The sales program is just one of them.

We needed something that was going to be

scalable from day one.

Because we were going to be big from day one.

And also, the level of user intervention and automation

needed to be high.

When you're dealing with things like desktop tools,

which is where sometimes individual faculty or staff

members might start off because it's relatively cheap,

you have a lot of control, you can do it yourselves.

That's very labor intensive.

Our initial process was basically a desktop tool.

We had a camcorder on a tripod and then our graduate

assistants--

God bless them-- they had to download everything, convert

the files, match them up, and then

publish them on the Internet.

And we were involving IT in kind of managing that process

and creating the custom application.

And it's just not feasible.

We have over 300 students in the professional sales program

and do about a thousand role plays a semester.

And that's just on the sales side.

That doesn't even get into the other aspects of what we do in

the lecture capture side, so we needed to have something

that would have a lower total cost of ownership.

So consequently, we went appliance-based on that.

And just to define what we're talking about with total cost

of ownership, you need to look at your initial investment,

but also your ongoing costs.

And a lot of times, especially budget situations being what

they are, you're looking at, well, who's going to have the

lowest bid to do the base or the fundamentals of what we

need to do?

And those things are important to take a look at.

But you also need to take a look at the ongoing costs.

Different vendors, their machines are built

differently, they work differently.

And then obviously, their

licensing models are different.

And we'll talk about those details.

But the other thing I would encourage you to do is take a

look at this four to five years out because this is an

investment.

This is something that's going to take some time and clearly,

you want something that's going to be

beneficial down the road.

This is a basic synopsis of what you're getting because

you're going to be cutting more than one check, I'll put

it to you that way.

You're going to be cutting a check to a

lecture capture vendor.

And for that investment, you're going to be getting

your recorders, server software, and then obviously

you're going to have support for your recorders, and then

support for your server software as well.

And obviously, don't forget to budget for ongoing annual

support in that respect.

And then the other aspect is partnerability.

And kind of touch on that a little bit later.

But then, there are other things that you will have to

purchase and invest in.

You're going to camcorders, microphones, server hardware.

And I have that in bold red because that's a big one.

That's a big one that you definitely

do not want to overlook.

Because it's not just a matter of buying something and

sticking some software in a box, it's a fairly--

I don't want to say a complex, yet simple environment that

can easily dramatically increase your

total cost of ownership.

Networking hardware, people run it.

But then also your mission-related functionality.

Lecture capture is your obvious initial point

of entry onto this.

But some other things to take into consideration is the

content management.

You capture it to share it.

Content management is consequently pretty important.

That way you are able to share things with individuals, not

only within the university and your active directory

environment for those technical

people that are watching.

But also for people outside of the university as well.

Universities have served multiple customers,

regionally, nationally, and globally.

And so being able to bring in those other individuals is

going to be really important.

And also, opportunity costs beyond lecture capture.

Because there is a lot of potential.

Once again, with branding, differentiation, and new

revenue streams that are out there to be realized.

Some questions to ask vendors about when it comes to

recorders is, is it a dedicated appliance or

basically a beefed up PC?

Sometimes they can stick some extra cards and whatnot in

there and then it's a recorder.

But you want to make sure you know what you're getting.

The other thing is, where does the data

compression take place?

And the location of the data compression, this is going to

have an impact on server costs.

And we'll talk about that in a little bit.

But you definitely want to know where that compression is

taking place.

And then also, frequency of refresh.

These recorders, no matter where you get them, they're

not going to last forever.

So although some of us might have computers and printers in

our offices that we think have been around forever, recorders

will probably have to be refreshed at

some point in time.

And obviously, what's the time frames and

associated costs for that?

And when it comes to your server software, what's the

licensing metric?

Are you buying or are you

essentially leasing the software?

Because with some companies, you get this all-in-one.

And it also gets into bundling.

What's your base package for the server software?

And then, what are you actually going to be

adding on to it?

So sometimes when you look at the thing, your business

requirements and what you need to do, you'll find out that

you need to purchase add-on modules for certain things

that you want to accomplish.

And the whole concept of buying your server software

versus leasing it where you have this annual license fee,

that's why I'm encouraging you to look four

or five years out.

Because while your initial investment might look a little

bit lower, over time that dollar amount for an annual

license fee is definitely going to add up.

And obviously, impact your total cost of ownership.

And obviously, annual support, pretty standard on recorders

and in server software.

The human element is critical on this.

Because the partnerability is huge.

This starts with the very first time you interact with a

salesperson from a particular vendor.

Are they treating this as a transaction, or are they

looking to actually form a relationship and a

partnership?

And a lot of times you can tell by how responsive they

are, the types of questions they ask you.

Who's doing most of the talking in some cases.

And so it's important for you to understand because how they

treat you as a prospect, you want to get a sense of how

you're going to be treated once you're actually a

customer in terms of where the priorities are at and how that

relationship works.

And also, the knowledge, experience, and background of

individuals on that team.

Are your interactions just with a salesperson or are your

interactions with multiple people at multiple levels of

that organization?

And if they're taking a team-based approach, then you

know that you have a whole team or a cadre of individuals

that are working and concerned about your organization

succeeding.

And then there's the manpower aspect on your end.

This really, is going to depend on the implementation.

At the University of Toledo, we do have a blend of this in

the College of Business where we have full automation.

The lecture capture side of things, we do have full-blown

automation.

The recorders load all by themselves, they start by

themselves, they stop by themselves.

That way all the faculty has to do is come in and turn on

the Crestron and they are completely good to go.

We also use control room attendants for

our role play room.

We do have a centralized control room where all of the

role play interactions are fed into.

And that process is managed that way.

And then, we do have classroom crews for rooms that are not

Mediasited.

And for the few rooms that are not Mediasited, obviously we

do need individuals to do portable setups.

And so obviously, you would need to have

manpower for that.

Camcorders and microphones, obviously you want to make

sure that you understand the level of quality that the

recorders can actually take in.

Because some of you might have more specific requirements in

terms of things being more detailed rich.

But you want to know about the level of quality, you want to

know about the type of signal that it can accept.

And then also, networking hardware.

At some point, depending on how big your implementation

is, you might need to look into load balancers.

And if you do have a need to do high availability and

failover, what do you have in place or what should you have

in place to facilitate that?

Server hardware.

I've got a little piggy on this slide because it can be a

big resource piggy.

And also, consequently a money piggy.

And with this one, you want to look at, first and foremost,

how many servers are you going to need?

Part of what it gets into is where the compression takes

place and what their workflow is for managing the capture,

the synchronization, and then the storage, and then the

sharing of your content.

There's lots of things that happened behind the scenes.

And so understanding how many servers are we going to need?

And then aside from the number of servers, what role is that

server going to have?

Typically, you have two different types of servers or

two types of roles.

You have a provider, which is where the data storage takes

place until it's actually called on to watch a

presentation.

And then servers also play a processing role.

And when a server's a processor this is kind of the

brains of the operation.

They're the ones that are managing user privileges and

security levels and the automation on scheduling and

the content publishing.

It's also going to impact the number of concurrent users

that you can have. Depending on the size of your

implementation, are you going to have 50 people watch, 100,

250, thousands?

It all depends on what you're streaming.

So obviously, you're going to need to have servers that can

handle that.

Ask them if a server can perform more than one role.

I know in our environment we have two servers and our

servers do have shared roles on that.

You want to know how much storage you're going to need.

And once again, what are you storing?

Are you storing raw, uncompressed data, and/or the

compressed data?

Because once again, that's going to drive

up your server expense.

And obviously, the manpower required to maintain that.

And obviously, you want to know about file size per hour

of capture.

What are your archiving plans?

And then obviously, take that number and unfortunately,

double it for things like high availability and backups.

And just to reiterate, all of these different things about

your server environment, the data compression, the file

size, what role can you double up, this has a direct

correlation to the functionality with the lecture

capture platform you're going to go for.

These are going to affect-- this is what we found in our

experience.

This is going to impact your ability to edit, your ability

whether or not you can live stream, whether or not there's

content management and what it looks like.

And obviously, also the level of end user empowerment.

In terms of mission-related functionality, most schools

initially go out looking for lecture capture, which I

consider a point of entry application.

You're supplementing class lectures, you're expanding

seats with online students, great way to enhance EMBA

programs, individuals with busy schedules.

And then in some cases, having online only classes.

And that's more of the traditional route on it.

But also, content management is huge.

I mentioned earlier that you capture content to share it.

And in our experience and with our business requirements,

having a standalone content management system, a CMS, that

is imperative.

Because even though we're in higher education and lecture

capture is certainly a part of the equation, we use

Blackboard.

And I would imagine a lot of you use Blackboard as well.

But once you start getting into multiple classes of

students needing to get access to the same content, or you

start branching out into the business community and you

have firms accessing things, or working professionals,

Blackboard wasn't necessarily designed to handle that.

And so you need to make sure that you have something that

yes, of course, integrates with Blackboard because that

does make life easier.

But at the same point in time, that it has a standalone

content management solution.

That way you can continue to do outreach and engagement

with your other customers out in the business community.

And obviously, this doesn't take long.

I've talked to some other universities and colleagues

and that's not to say that' down the road.

Doesn't take very long for you to start realizing the

potential and the opportunities that you can

have to do those things.

And speaking of the opportunity cost that you have

down the road, a good question to ask yourself, especially in

the economic climate that we find ourselves in, is do we

and can we afford to walk away from some of these other

things that we can be leveraging

lecture capture for?

And that is continuing education.

I think working professionals nowadays, have really

recognized the importance of having current education.

Not everybody has the time and/or the budget to go back

and get a second bachelor's degree or go back and get a

master's degree.

But they still have that intrinsic motivation to

improve themselves and stay current.

And there's lots of talent at your university just like

there is at the University of Toledo.

And what can you do to help those individuals with

professional development and certificate programs?

The events that take place on campus: conferences, summits,

forums. Even with graduation, you have international

students and their parents that would love to be able to

participate.

You've got family members they can't make it in for health or

monetary reasons.

Streaming graduation would be a huge value add.

And obviously, looking at events as well.

Classroom projects.

We do role plays and other types of things that can be

captured in there.

And then obviously, looked at to jump down a little bit on

recruiting tools.

There's really a lot of opportunity for recruiting

tools, which is almost a whole separate webinar.

Research.

One of our honor students used the Mediasite to capture her

focus group.

And then she was able to watch it after the fact and then

work on her honor's thesis.

And then also, facility rentals.

Just because you're not using it all the time doesn't mean

the business community might not want to use it.

We've already been renting out our facility and we'll

continue to do so as once again, another supplemental

revenue stream for the university in this respect.

But at this point, this is kind of it in a nutshell.

And I don't know if any of you have any

questions or thoughts.

They have questions.

Or additional detail you would like me

to go into on anything.

They definitely have questions.

But first of all, fantastic job on those remarks.

And the first sign in a question that I can ask, the

first sign that you've done a great job in pulling together

valuable information for the audience is when a lot of

people ask, can they have your slides?

Yes.

So the answer is yes, you can and you already do.

For those of you who asked underneath the links

icon near the video.

If you click on that you'll see a PDF of Deirdre's

presentation.

So I'm going to try to sort through these and get through

as many as we can in the time that we have. One question

that came in from a couple of different people, so I'm going

to synthesize it together.

You were kind enough to mention that in your case,

your facility was around a quarter of a

million dollars all in.

Everything, cameras, furniture--

That's list price, not with budget.

I'm with the professional sales program.

Roughly speaking, people want to know, where did the budget

come from for this?

Did you apply for grants?

Did you get it from executives at schools?

A big pitch at the board level?

Or was it all of the above?

Telephone, bake sales?

Yeah, it's a little bit of everything that's up there.

In terms of the budget, we came up with the quarter

million dollar figure because this was kind of our worst

case scenario.

If nobody gave us discounts, if we weren't able to

negotiate, what's worst case scenario?

And obviously, it's all worth a quarter million.

And on some level, what can you put a price on education

and impacting lives?

But the quarter million dollars includes more--

rest assured-- way more than just the Sonic Foundry

solution part of it.

How many rooms are enabled again?

We have four role play rooms. Four role play rooms. And then

we have a control room, which is where all of our rack

recorders are sitting.

And we also have a portable unit as well because we take

the portable on the road with us.

I'm actually doing a training session this summer for a

telecommunications company and I'm going to use the portable

to capture the training.

That way they can watch it again after the fact.

And so we have the four role play rooms and then the

control room.

We also have a business center room where we have computers

and telephones, and copy, scanner, fax machine for our

students to use when they do service learning because we

interact with the business community a lot.

It's also a great place for the business members to hang

out when they're coming into class speak.

We have a resource media room with books, journals,

periodicals.

And then we also have a conference room, which has web

conferencing in it.

Because that's the other thing we're going to be using the

Mediasite for, is you can actually couple the webcasting

with the web and videoconferencing to really

expand audiences and get super slick with it.

We've actually been role playing for the past two years

with students in Helsinki, Finland, and so now this will

enable us in a dedicated room finally.

What do you use for web conferencing?

Not to change the subject.

Yeah, we use LifeSize is what we've elected to do in the

College of Business.

So you have students joined together from Helsinki and the

Mediasite is recording that and saving it for posterity to

the EX server so people can watch it over and over?

Yes.

Which is great.

And also, with web conferencing, we're

investigating stuff with conferences as well.

That way we can present and attend because with the web

and videoconferencing, you're getting the two-way real time

communication, which is an important piece.

And the Mediasite lets you expand the audiences.

That way people can watch passively as

a fly on the wall.

Got it.

But bottom line, from what I'm hearing you say, the majority

of the funds that you used, you made a constructive,

coherent budget, defended it, and were successful at getting

it from your highly enlightened institution?

And this includes money for furniture because we had to

pay for furniture.

So there's more than just the technology in the money.

And the SPSS-- no.

ESSPS, the Edward H.

Schmidt School of Professional Sales.

And in terms of how we got the money, we fundraised.

We really had to.

And actually, the complex itself is the Savage &

Associates Complex for Business Learning Engagement.

So obviously, that organization which has a great

history with the Toledo area and the university, they

obviously helped us out a huge amount with that.

But also, we have other corporations that actually

donated to have rooms named after them.

And so some of you might be thinking, how am I going to

get companies?

These firms are recruiting your students, they're hiring

your students.

You are helping them to save time and save

money and ramp up.

And so I would look at some of the firms that do a lot of

heavy recruiting and see if there's some money that they

can give you.

Especially if you have dedicated purposes that you're

going to use for it to enhance curricula and the student

quality I would look at them.

So we did a lot of fundraising.

And we also have a very active corporate partner program with

firms that routinely financially support the

program because they're so happy with the quality that

we're able to provide with our students.

And so we have operating funds that we used as well.

And we did also have some grants.

Some of the international projects that we have, there

was international grant that our international business

institute was able to get applied toward this.

We try to stay away from this and I know you asked us to

stay away from this in terms of naming names, but there's

so many people asking.

Can you generically say, big picture, we know the Sonic

Foundry one, but it's a great market out there

of different stuff.

People want to know, too many people want to know, who did

you look at broadly when you first started out?

Put you on the spot.

Put you on the spot.

Or categories.

Categories.

Did you look at software solutions?

We did look at software solutions, and those--

Did you look at this, did you look-- and basically in the

categories, did you look at software only solutions, as

well as hardware based solutions?

We looked at software only solutions.

And there are some vendors--

there are vendors that play in all different spaces of

desktop software and appliance-based.

And so obviously, we did look at a vendor that played in all

three of those spaces.

We've looked at vendors that were just software only.

Most of the vendors we looked at played in the

appliance-based area.

Because we knew very early on because of our requirements,

the scalability, the live streaming, the content

management, that we needed to go--

Go with that thought because that's another follow-up

question that people have. How did you end up with an

appliance-based approach versus a

software-based approach?

That will hit about six people.

With that particular part of the solution, and there's even

different levels.

And that's the thing that's so daunting.

Because going into this, I never imagined that I would

know as much as I do as I know now about the different

options and all the different moving parts.

For us, we were looking at-- the automation

was going to be key.

And I would say the content management side of things.

Because with your desktop tools and your software only

tools, the content management just frankly, it's not there.

You're relying on a lot of manual publishing.

There's lots of hands that need to touch things before

they get out.

And so we wanted something that would be automated, so

it's easy to use.

And also from the content management side of things,

that was a big one for us because we knew we needed to

have the business community have access to

things from the get-go.

And some of these other tools, you cannot have the business

community have access.

They'll tell you that it will integrate with your custom

CMS. Well, who's going to buy and build that custom CMS?

I've had that conversation before with our IT team.

And they see me coming, they're like, oh God.

And then they're like, well, we don't have the time or the

effort to build something custom.

And when you've got something that's already put together

like Sonic Foundry and some other vendors have, it's why

build something if it's already there?

So if I may, to gather in what you said.

So you were kind enough to share with these folks and in

the supplementary information, there is even more examples

where Deirdre has shared their rubric.

So for your benefits that you had identified that are

important, you found that the built in matched the workflow

that you had.

Better automation, content management

might have been a strength.

But at the same time, you recognized that maybe if there

was different criteria, there might be advantages to going a

different way?

Absolutely.

I mean you really need to take a look at your business

requirements.

I kind of quickly brought up--

there is a list of questions that we had shared with

multiple vendors because we were trying to be very

systematic about what we were doing.

And things like intellectual property and security.

And we looked at our business requirements and why is

security important to us.

And then, what do you do to help us secure the content?

Because in some cases, content might be publicly available.

Because they're relying on the security of Blackboard or

something else.

But if that link was somehow shared or pass along via

e-mail to somebody else, other individuals could possibly

have access to it.

Now granted it might be a stretch of the imagination to

think that they could maybe find that link or somehow

discover it.

But nonetheless, it's a little unsettling to think that some

things might not be as locked down as they could be because

there's no content management built in to some of these

other solutions that are out there.

So this was just kind of a real quick thing with

different functional areas and questions.

And then the other thing we had put together was listing

once again the functional areas and then talking about

specific features.

But then, what's the so what?

What's the benefit?

What's the impact on it?

In some cases, and you can see at the top--

What you've put on the screen here, you actually went into

the actual documents?

And these are shared with you all as well.

But these are the actual documents that you used to

score as the different vendors, including us, came

through, like Dancing With the Stars.

It was kind of like that, right?

Anyway, as we came through, this is the actual score sheet

that you wouldn't show us then.

OK, got you.

Now we get to see it and we did OK.

All right, and about how many--

I'll just finish that question off.

Not to put you on the spot.

So maybe six, seven vendors?

We had three make it to basically, I guess you could

say the final cut.

Because there were lots of other vendors because we did

work with other colleagues and other colleges at the

university.

And they would say, oh, I heard something

about so and so.

And so we would read stuff in other trade publications like

Campus Technology and stuff.

And oh, I haven't heard about that one.

And so I would read what other publications had to say about

it, go to their web sites.

But once again, you need to look at, what are you getting

out of the box versus down the road?

Because it's important to understand what does their

base software provide you the ability to do?

And then if you decide to grow, is

there going to add-ons?

Because there's some things that are so attractive

initially because it's like either zero cost or really

cheap cost. But then the moment you start going

gangbusters with it, your ability to scale up is going

to be severely impeded because there's no content management.

Totally makes sense.

Or because you find out that your server costs

are going to go up.

And there was a huge, huge, huge difference between what

our server hardware was going to cost with Sonic Foundry

than some of the other providers.

That's where your pig came in?

That's where the pig came in, like I have

to put the pig there.

Because I was worried.

Lost some weight, but--

No, Sean.

You look fabulous.

Server size requirements.

You actually found a significant difference based

on the information given to you by the manufacturers of

what you were going to need?

OK.

That goes to another question here and I'll try to get to

some more here.

A couple of people, but Jackie, a friend, asked about

cloud storage solutions.

So she's forecasting the future.

She said, hosting on-site may be useful today, but not

useful to most institutions for the future.

Has any cloud storage capability been looked at with

the institution for the future?

We have not.

Just as a background, I'm technical enough to be

dangerous, but I'm not an IT, full-fledged person.

Cloud computing has come up on campus and whatnot.

And we did consider possibly doing a hosted solution

because Sonic Foundry and some others, obviously provide

hosted capabilities.

So it was important to you that us and others

are able to do that?

Exactly.

But you guys decided, your IT department said, hey, we can

rock this for now?

Yes, we can totally rock this for now.

But there's like ad hoc things.

I mentioned graduation earlier.

Using a hosted solution for something like graduation,

right now we can do 250 concurrent users at the

University of Toledo.

Graduation, probably going to have a little bit more

attraction than that.

So consequently--

Family alone would be--

Exactly.

And so we would want to have for special events where we

knew we needed to have just a crazy amount of horsepower to

support the concurrent live viewers, then we would

definitely want to know that somebody had our back.

And we're going to jump around here.

Now my friend, Tom, who's actually from a major

corporation.

So there's not all higher ed people

watching just so you know.

He said, good question, a lot of people ask this is

different ways, but Tom asked it the best. What costs

surprised you the most?

Surprised you the most. You probably weren't

surprised by anything.

But either surprised by the amount or surprised by the

high cost. Or you may have been surprised that there

would be a cost you didn't expect.

What, with all your matrices and notes and process still

got by you where you're like, darn, this furniture costs a

lot of money.

And I'm hoping it's not from Mediasite.

But tell them the truth.

I think the only thing that had--

we weren't really surprised because we didn't really have

a baseline going into this.

We knew that we didn't know what we didn't know.

And I think for a lot of organizations, whether it's

higher education or corporate, sometimes you don't know what

you don't know.

And it's important to recognize that because I think

participating in today's webinar is a

step in that direction.

That you're saying, look, I want to make sure that I'm

understanding all the moving parts.

And so I guess you could say on some lever we weren't

really surprised because--

You were doing information gathering

to develop the scope.

Exactly.

It's not like we had a pile of money and we said, OK, well,

here's x amount of dollars.

What can we do with it?

The only thing that did kind of come--

I don't want to say as a surprise, but that caught our

attention once again, is the server hardware piece of it.

Hence the pig.

Hence the pig because we heard from Sonic Foundry how much

our server infrastructure was going to cost.

It's very important to us to [UNINTELLIGIBLE].

What the servers would do.

And then we worked with another vendor and then we got

that estimate and I was like, holy moly.

So you're looking like, OK, well we're working on the same

assumptions.

You know, x number of rooms, and x

amount of hours of capture.

And this is what it is?

And then you bundle on top of that some of the

mission-related functionality differences and it escalated

pretty quick where it was like, yeah, I think this is

where we need to be.

So making sure everything was included in the first place.

You've hit a couple times on costs.

That some feature you need was not going to be external to

the product.

And also, the server costs were something you felt you

needed to pay attention to that you didn't necessarily

think going in.

Just to kind of go back.

There's a lot of areas and this is kind of related to

Tom's question.

The cost for cameras.

Because you have a lot of options with cameras.

You really do.

You do.

A huge range.

I'm going to put it to you this way, when I was doing the

initial testing phase and stuff, I'll admit it.

I took a portable recorder to my home and I was webcasting

live out of my dining room at home.

And I was using--

So you're saying there are webcasts with Noah and

Madeline as stars if they're watching?

They do not exist any more.

But I was just using my personal little Sony handheld

camcorder at home and it worked.

Granted, it wasn't the best picture quality because it's

just a regular family type camcorder.

Single chip.

Exactly.

The camcorders we have in our role play facility, we have--

Are what?

--high definition.

But I mean they ask every time.

So what are they?

They're Sony high definition robotic camcorders.

And so that's what we're using in the role play rooms. But in

the classrooms, we're still using some Sony PTZs in there.

They're not as high tech or as sophisticated.

But those HD robotic camcorders, they cost a lot

more than the cameras we're using in the classrooms. And

we've also invested in some really nice portable

camcorders that we can use when we go to a non-Mediasited

classroom, or especially when we're doing events and

training sessions off campus with corporate clients.

Totally makes sense.

And those can cost a lot too.

I'm going to try to chop a few here.

Another experience, a friend of mine, that asks, totally,

how many recorders will you have versus how many IT staff

will it take to support them?

So I know you're working towards a universe of 11.

Is that correct?

Actually, we have 14 recorders right now.

OK.

And how many people does it take to operate them?

We haven't had to add anybody.

Our IT team, and this is something that we're

supporting within the college of business ourselves.

We're not looking at university IT on this.

They're involved in the loop, obviously.

But it's been able to be fractional elements of the

existing IT staff that existed before you put in your first

lecture capture system, and it's working?

Exactly.

And it's working.

We have 11--

Much like my friend Vick.

Except he has a lot more.

OK, so now this is a

contest. It's on.

Yeah, it is.

I'll see you afterwards.

But we have the 11 rack recorders and

then the three portables.

And yeah, we haven't had to add any IT

individual's on this.

And part of that is the fact that we were able to integrate

it within the classroom, technology

that was already there.

So an instructor can turn on the Crestron.

That automatically triggers the Mediasite.

And whatever they're doing on the document camera or the

SMART Board or the PC, it's getting automatically thrown

and integrated in with the Crestron.

And so consequently, it's getting

thrown on the Mediasite.

So there's nothing extra that our faculty have to do because

of the automation aspect of it.

We set up a schedule at the start of the semester and let

it rock and roll.

There's a follow-up to that.

Just to continue to hit these questions that came in.

Do you have an ownership policy as to who owns the

content that gets recorded, faculty or university?

Can the faculty use it for other

non-univesity related purposes?

That's a question and it came up--

Different at every campus around the world.

It is.

It's going to be different because are you

union, are you non-union?

And then, what's university policy?

And in some cases, like with distance learning at the

University of Toledo, if you do a class that's completely

DL, you basically sign away your rights to it.

But if you're using a web-assisted technology and

that's different and it gets into some of the things that--

So for the distance learning programs it was already

established law, so this--

Yeah, it was an already established law.

For the new stuff, the blended learning, jump ball.

Exactly.

Because what we're looking at doing and this is an ongoing

conversation, and we're going to set standards and protocol.

But look at what other universities are doing and

what works within your organization

for level of comfort.

And on some level, how entrepreneurial your faculty

and staff are.

But we do see ourselves--

within the sales group, were very collegial,

great working team.

And we're going to take turns developing content and we're

going to have a structure, so that yes, we're seeing extra

compensation.

But so is the university for being able to

provide that content.

I have like one more minute or one and a half more minutes.

I'm going to try to hit a couple of questions combined

together, like rapid fire.

So first of all, did you say you have room control,

Crestron control, in the classrooms?

In the classrooms.

They're touchpad Crestron control.

So that was one question.

Keys for choosing Mediasite.

What I've heard you lace in here even though everything

was great that you shopped for that the strengths were the

content management was integrated, security was

integrated, we are successful in making efficient use of

servers and avoiding the pig icon.

So that overall you were able to get that automation that

allows you to use a lot of people.

Fair enough?

Fair enough.

I'd add the live streaming capability.

Going live is important.

And obviously, the flexibility when it comes to editing as

well as another thing.

Because you can take content and repackage it as needed.

The other thing, the interactivity.

The interactivity aspect--

That's our question right here.

--is important.

Because it's nice to even have the live stream, but can the

audience interact with you?

Are they just kind of sitting there thinking, I wish I could

ask a question?

What can I do to get more information?

And to be able to provide even as something as simple as a

presentation link to a calendar of events or to

register for an event, or to fill out a job application, to

have those presentation links available and attached is

importance.

They ask a question so that you can reconnect with a

faculty member--

Like we're doing.

Exactly.

And I think that has--

both on and offline.

You use that, where it goes right to their e-mail.

Exactly.

And that's really important.

And so is reporting.

Well, fantastic.

Well, there's many more questions than I can get to.

But I've used up all your time.

We need to get you back on your planes and get back to

Madeleine and Noah.

We'd like to thank you guys.

We know those two were supposed to watch this

too, so good job.

If you guys made it this far, you're the best

little kids in the world.

I would like to thank you so much for coming here and

sharing a very detailed view in how you set up your lecture

capture view for your campus.

I'd like to thank all of you from around the world for

joining us once again in such large numbers for another live

webinar about creative uses of Mediasite.

We look forward to hearing any ideas you have

about future topics.

I'd like to thank Sonic Foundry Event Services for

producing this webcast and we will see all of

you the next time.