NCALT Live! ICT Guidance
This is information for ICT professionals on how to make NCALT Live! operate in your force.
NCALT Live! is an install of Adobe Connect installed on CJX web servers. It is part of the NCALT Managed Learning Environment and is security accredited by the National Accreditor for policing systems for use up to the protected marking level of RESTRICTED. It is a web meeting system available nationally and meetings can be set up within a force or from force to force. The NPIA are currently using it for national sessions that your force personnel may be asking to join and your force members may be asking you that they wish to use it as a training system for the delivery of online training, thus removing the need for your officers and staff to travel to training classrooms.
Brochure Information:
Main System Test:
(requires Flash 9+ to run this test)
Adobe Requirements Page:
There are two types of request you may have from members of your force. They will depend upon the role that they are requesting to operate as.
Participant or Student
This role is for people who wish to join an event. For this the requirements are Flash 8 or above and access to both live.ncalt.pnn.police.uk and livemeeting.ncalt.pnn.police.uk through your firewalls and proxy servers. The service requires TCP Ports 80, 443 and 1935. This role may be requested by many members of your force and we recommend that this is set up access across the whole of your force.
Host or Presenter
This role is for people that wish to host web meetings. The audience will be much smaller and anticipated to be a handful of people in each force to start. Requirements are as above and:
- Flash 9 or above
- An Add-in for the system
- Webcams (optional but recommended)
The add-in will automatically try to install itself when someone has the role of presenter. This can be tested via the main system test link above. If it does not install it is usually that your force is blocking downloads. Either allow downloads from the URLs above, for the users that request host or presenter rights, or manually install the add-in for the users from here: http://live.ncalt.pnn.police.uk/common/addin/setup.exe
Once installed, the add in requires the following files to be allowed to execute:
C:\Documents and Settings\[UserProfile]\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player\www.macromedia.com\bin\connectaddin\
connectaddin.exe
connecthook.dll
connectsprd.dll
meetingconvertor.dll
digest.s
NCALT have received the NPIA National Accreditors approval for the use of webcams on CJX connected computers. The prerequisites for allowing personnel to use webcams are that they must be UVC (Universal Video Class) compliant, meaning that they will work on Windows XP SP2 machines or above, without the need for installing any drivers, along with the user signing a locally owned WebCam usage policy. Each force must therefore get a webcam usage policy approved locally. We are happy to send you the NPIA one as a draft for you to use and you may localise it at your will. The key to this is to have one person own the policy who has both a remit and will to push it through.
Other ICT Considerations are based mainly around security and bandwidth.
Security
The system is approved for connection to the CJX and processing of RESTRICTED information by the NPIA National Accreditors in accordance with the CJX Code of Connection. If your security team require any further information we are more than willing to discuss this with them.
Bandwidth
Each concurrent person uses between about 10kbits/s and 80kbits/s with occasional bursts to 140kbits/s, depending on what the user is doing. Most force will pilot with a couple of one hour sessions a week for 5-10 people so the total amount of bandwidth is not normally significant. It is also possible for the host to specify a maximum bandwidth, so they can limit it to max 56kbits/s if bandwidth is required to be restricted.
The recommendation is to monitor the bandwidth and limit your force to 10 to 20 host licences while you measure the impact to your network and CJX connection. The formality of your monitoring and governance will depend heavily on your calculated risk to exceeding your CJX pipe on operational information system performance or cost of exceeding your contracted bandwidth. The business case on savings on travel and subsistence alone is enough to procure extra bandwidth however this is advised to be a business led task.
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