User:Gary WebTrain

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WebTrain Communications is a privately-held Canadian company established in 1999 that hosts web conferencing services intended for vertical markets. The conferencing software it uses is developed in-house, and runs inside a browser.^[1] According to the British Columbia Technology Industry Association, WebTrain was recognized at the 2006 BCTIA Technology Impact awards ceremony.^[2]^[3]

[edit] History

The WebTrain concept was developed in 1998 by Gary Campbell for the purpose of reducing training costs for off-site business clients. The idea was expanded to include additional communication services. Six different communication products were released after two years of initial development. Each of the software products provided a specific set of features related to its intended market. There was a call alert monitor, a free PC-PC telephone application, a virtual business meetings application, a webinar presentation application, a virtual conference center application, and a web based virtual classroom application. All products were VoIP based.

After releasing the different products in 2001, it was found that clients wanted a single product that provided all of the features offered by each of the separate applications and services. In 2003, WebTrain released version 1 of their Communicator product, merging the feature sets of the separate applications into a single hosted application. Version 2 was released Feb 11, 2003.^[4]

Version 3 of the Communicator was released August 6, 2006. The English and French Canadian version releases included integrated branding with custom URL, an extensible feature set, additional VoIP features, additional connectivity (proxy SSL tunneling and connectivity discovery) and a major improvement to SSL streaming.^[5] The release also included migrating the clusters of meeting servers to .NET C#. Secure server-to-server API's were also released, enabling vendors or resellers to perform all back-end functionality (account requisitioning, single sign-on, billing integration, account sharing, etc). The API's enable a vendor's servers to host content pages (controlling the look and feel) relating to single sign-on, account management, hosting, scheduling and listing meetings.

On April 4 2008, version 4 of the Communicator was announced, a major release providing additional features and web services; the expected release date (as stated on their website) is sometime in June or July 2008.