A video-conferencing distributed service tailored for education

At present, a lot of initiatives aim at using Internet applications for traditional telecom domains like voice telephony and media on demand. So far these applications are difficult to integrate in the telecom framework, mid are treated rather as separate classes of services. Also, telecom services are traditionally executed in the context of “service sessions”, and the software representation and management of the service session allows to control the service in a rich and flexible way. This paper describes an experiment focused on distance education, which demonstrates the integrability of an Internet commercial application in a distributed object-oriented architecture for telecom services. Also, it demonstrates that by adding session-based service control, Internet applications gain an added value. In detail, it integrated a commercial conferencing application in a TINA compliant telecom framework, and it extended the application features to support tele teaching conference sessions in a flexible and intuitive way