Update 03-09-2009

OK, I am back. Sorry for the delay. Anyway, we now have focus on a thesis topic and have a target acquired. The new thesis topic is: Exploring the Experience of Educational Innovation and Change in Emergency Response in the St. Louis Metropolitan Area. The project remains on track. Although we are reevaluating the delivery method. The Tandberg bid came back at $1,430,000.00. Yes, that’s right 1.43 million and that project was just for St. Charles County. That is only for the hardware. Nothing for curricula development, no staff positions, noddaa…

So on version # 2 we looked at shrinking the project to just the City of St. Charles FD. The hardware budget then shrank to a modest $430,391.95. Well, that seems a little extreme for an organization that has to beg for Fire Trucks when the old ones are worn out. I just can not justify the incredible expense of the hardware based systems. They are just not feasible at this time for us. Especially when we are wanting to make this program available for our brother volunteer organizations who do not have a history of strong funding streams.

So we looked at the Internet based systems. These included e/pop – WebEx – Mega Meeting. Each of them had their ups and downs. All of them require a subscription fee. Most of them are better that I thought they would be. WebEx was $6,000 per year and required a audio (phone based) subscription to go along with it. e/pop and Mega Meeting were good solutions but again each entity needed a subscription service that was $4,000 - $6,000/ per year.

Now we are looking at software based systems. The primary solution that we are getting to test is Microsoft’s Live Meeting. We will start the process this week. We are going on a 30 day free trail. I will let you guys know in two weeks if we are going to purchase the product or not. The cost will be about $2,000 a year for our department. The only draw back that I see is that MS Live does not have the multi party screen. So if you are having a conference you only see one of the participants – not all of them. With Mega Meeting and e/pop you can see up to 9. That would be preferred but I can not argue with the $2,000 MS price tag.

With MS Live meeting we can have up to 1,250 people attend the web meeting. If you are looking at a regional asset how can you beat that for a total of $2,000 a year? The only draw back is the limited video display.

More to follow shortly….