What is the best way(s) to setup a remote studio or 2nd location that wants to share content with the WireReady home system?
A: It depends, there are advantages and disadvantages for each different method. Here are some ideas:
CLASSIC CONFIGURATION
The classic configuration, usually consists of installing separate WireReady systems and using our WANReady module to form an in-house wire service system. In this configuration, users can single-click stories with embedded sound/pictures and other links between one or more sites. All transfers occur in the background, with compression (if enabled) to speed transfers. In this configuration, each system is separate and they can only see/access their own work, but they can send/share content they want to make available to other members of their network. Enabling direct access between multiple sites requires a physical network connection to the server (via IP/internet) through the methods discussed below.
VPN using your own IP address(es)
Some customers run machines at a second or additional site as a VPN using your own IP link. WireReady can physically be copied to the local hard-drive(s) or a small shared/drive server at the remote location for speed, and you give them their own "Custom folder list" (take a look at wire\system\cusdir32.dat on your home system- it's a text file and you'll see how this works). Assuming you can map the same path (or use equivalent UNC // share paths), you can give the 2nd site folks access to
view any text or audio files they need on your system, but also give them some of their own local folders for their in-house stuff. In this fashion, when they have a need for speed, they save and open off their local LAN, but they are able to retrieve and save directly to the home system even if the bandwidth isn't nearly as fast.
Keep in mind when a second or additional site begins using WireReady software that is installed in any fashion on thier own computers, you may need to expand your software license to cover those additional sites.
As far as the wirefile is concerned, if you do nothing, if the same drive mapping points to the home system they will be running off the home wirefile. However, because this can cause problems if the connection drops, it's possible to create a "replicator" as follows. We can help you setup a program which clips copies of all, or just specific categories of news to a directory on the home system. You put WINCAP on the remote system and it can be configured to look at the directory on the home system where these files are being written to. Wincap has a mode where it "scoops" these temporary files and loads them into a wire file on
the remote system. In this fashion it's super fast for the remote users, and you have some redundancy. Anytime the connection drops, it doesn't crash anything and no news is lost, rather as soon as the connection restores any "build up" of files waiting to be sucked in get transferred allowing the remote system to catch up.
This is, by far, the simplest of all scenarios. Anyone who has a 1 mbit pathway or faster (syncronous) between sites should use a VPN solution.
A couple other ideas for groups that haveremote sites with dial up connections or unreliable connections (this is also useful for mobile laptop installations that use wireless internet).
When a VPN/visible UNC // type path or mapped drive is not feasible from the remote to home system, you can run a completely standalone wireready system and we can setup some applet programs which let either newsroom "Zap" stories with embedded sound into each other's file logs like their own wire service. You just need to have an FTP server somewhere with one directory for each location. Our software automatically moves files between each system and the respective folder when they hit SEND. A third folder could be used for that WINCAP solution I mentioned, except here we have a robo-ftp like program (dbcapture.exe) that automatically moves the files from the home system to the FTP location, and then the same software at the remote end downloads them. But the clipping of stories I described and the actual scooping of those files by wincap remain the same. To speed audio transfers, you'll have to buy one or two copies of QDESIGN's mpeg ACM codec (www.qdesign.com $149 each). This allows us to mpeg compress audio files when they hop to and from the FTP server speeding transfers from 3 to 8 times depending on the bitstream you settle on.
Lastly, when the primary purpose of remote access is to edit and compose scripts, but not necessarily work remotely with audio, Windows has a built in web accessible system called Terminal Services, which is provided with 2000, 2003 Server and beyond. Multiple remote users can simultaneously log in and run a virtual session of WireReady. When the client computer in the field is running XP professional, there are no Microsoft fees other than standard CAL users on the server. A dedicated server can host many concurrent sessions at a time. If the server is also the server for the newsroom, care should be taken (through experimentation) not to allow more virtual remote sessions than can be done without any noticeable performance effects on the rest of the servers' functions. For years, customers have dedicated workstations and used products like pc/anywhere, VNC and GOTOMYPC. For some applications this works fine, but when you want just one computer in your rack serving multiple remote users, remote desktop works great. Remote desktop also supports some simple audio functions, but it's limited.
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