Towards good web conferencing system design for ubi-media collaboration

Media, data and documents are becoming ubiquitous in the past decade, across time zones and across organization boundaries. Web conferencing systems emerged as effective tools for people to communicate and collaborate. These systems combine multiple distributed applications to manipulate multimedia content within a conferencing session, and achieved great results. However, despite great development in such systems, current products on the market are still far from perfect in many aspects. In this paper, we first present an overview of existing systems, and then identify good system design principles based on our own experience with the existing systems. Finally, we outline several interesting research directions that may further enhance userspsila collaboration experience.