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Abstract. Several recent initiatives have been put in place by the CERN IT Department to improve the user experience in remote dispersed meetings and remote collaboration at large in the LHC communities worldwide. We will present an analysis of the factors which were historically limiting the efficiency of remote dispersed meetings and describe the consequent actions which were undertaken at CERN to overcome these limitations. After giving a status update of the different equipment available at CERN to enable the virtual sessions and the various collaborative tools which are currently proposed to users, we will focus on the evolution of this market: how can the new technological trends (among others, HD videoconferencing, Telepresence, Unified Communications, etc.) impact positively the user experience and how to attain the best usage of them. Finally, by projecting ourselves in the future, we will give some hints as to how to answer the difficult question of selecting the next generation of collaborative tools: which set of tools among the various offers (systems like Vidyo H264 SVC, next generation EVO, Groupware offers, standard H323 systems, etc.) is best suited for our environment and how to unify this set for the common user. This will finally allow us to definitively overcome the past antinomy between virtuality and efficiency. IntroductionIn 2007, the RCTF board (Remote Collaboration Task Force) was formed in response to recommendations of the LCG RTAG 12 Final Report [3]. The RTAG 12 has recommended several actions considered critical for the future of the collaborative tools in the LHC. Perhaps the most important one was to centralize the coordination of the remote collaborative activities under CERN IT, with oversight from the LHC experiments. Since then, RCTF has overseen the progress at CERN, effectively implementing most of the key recommendations. This has included the signing of servicelevel agreements by ATLAS and CMS and specifying the installation and support of conference facilities at CERN. Much of the deployment and installation work is now complete; the attention is shifting toward other challenges, including service and infrastructure consolidation and central application support by CERN/IT. The author will summarize a few of the successful implementations of the new policy and developments, before pointing out the new challenges and directions to focus in the near future.

The Information Technology department at CERN has been using ITIL Service Management methodologies [1] and ServiceNow since early 2011. In recent years, several developments have been accomplished regarding the data centre and service monitoring, as well as service status reporting. The CERN Service Portal, built on top of ServiceNow, hosts the CERN Service Status Board, which informs end users and supporters of ongoing service incidents, planned interventions and service changes. The Service Portal also includes the Service Availability Dashboard, which displays the technical status of CERN computing services. Finally, ServiceNow has been integrated with the data centre monitoring infrastructure, via GNI (General Notification Infrastructure) in order to implement event management and generate incidents from hardware, network, operating system and application alarms. We detail how these developments have been implemented, and how they help supporters monitor and solve issues and keep users informed of service status. Also, we highlight which lessons have been learnt after the implementation. Finally, possible future improvements are discussed.

CERN has been using ITIL Service Management methodologies and ServiceNow since early 2011. Initially a joint project between just the Information Technology and the General Services Departments, now most of CERN is using this common methodology and tool, and all departments are represented totally or partially in the CERN Service Catalogue. We introduce a summary of the current situation of Service Management at CERN, as well as its recent evolution. We discuss service onboarding, user experience, and tool configuration, outlining the challenges faced, solutions adopted and some important lessons learnt. Some of the most important points relate to CERN’s common process and service catalogue, which have enabled scalability; hiding complexity from users in order to improve user experience; and the good practices to configure CERN’s Service Management application which have been learnt in the 8 years of the project. Finally, we present ongoing and future work, such as the upgrade of the CERN Service Portal and bringing even more new services board.