The Web, Smiles, and Videotape

"Imagine the entire population of Hartford, Connecticut moving into your neighborhood overnight, and every one of them, about a quarter of a million people, needs to check their e-mail--at about the same time. That's a communications nightmare. And that's the daunting challenge facing Novell at this year's COMDEX/Fall."

So begins a two-minute clip from a news video that America West Airlines aired on all of its flights bound for Las Vegas, Nevada during the week of COMDEX/Fall '97. Filmed several months before the trade show, this news video features Ed McGarr, vice president of Marketing at Novell Inc., explaining Novell's plans for setting up the world's largest production network, COMDEX Intranet--Novell Connecting Points (NCP).

While McGarr is speaking, the news video shows Novell Corporate Events systems engineers at Novell's headquarters in Orem, Utah unloading the Compaq ProLiant 6000 servers and DeskPro 4000 workstations that were donated by Compaq. These engineers designed and tested NCP in the basement of one of Novell's buildings. The engineers then dismantled NCP and set it up again about five days before COMDEX began in Las Vegas.

At the end of the video, McGarr says, "You might want to ask, 'Why Novell? Why is Novell doing this?' Actually because nobody else can. Novell has the platform; Novell has the management; Novell has the directory; and Novell has the open standards-based collaboration in GroupWise that makes this system a no-brainer . . . Bottom line is," McGarr concludes, "we're the only ones who could do it."

As the only company willing (and apparently able) to set up a production network for 250,000 users, Novell felt that COMDEX Intranet--NCP was worth recording. Novell hired Fresh Inc. to speak to and film both Novell Corporate Events systems engineers and NCP users during various stages--while NCP was under construction, while NCP was in use, and after NCP had served its purpose.

Russ Dastrup, multimedia manager in Novell's GroupWise division, digitized the final videotape to create a 10-minute video that would be posted on the Internet. Dastrup used Adobe Premiere 4.2 from Adobe Systems Inc. and an Osprey-100 video capture board from Multimedia Access Corp. to capture the videotape footage as an uncompressed .AVI file. Dastrup then encoded this file as two streaming video files: one file for users who have a low-bandwidth (28.8 Kbit/s) Internet connection, and another file for users who have a high-bandwidth (56.6 Kbit/s) Internet connection.

Finally, Dastrup posted these files on one of Novell's web servers, which had been configured as a streaming video server. You can view the COMDEX Intranet--NCP video by downloading one of the files from Novell's World-Wide Web site (http://www.novell.com).