Glossary » session

session

an interactive connection involving more than one person and including all of the objects that they are sharing.

For instance, a videoconferencing session could be set up between two people which included a video connection and a shared whiteboard (a session is sometimes referred to as a call in traditional telecommunications terms).

The concept of a session is for the user to see a view which specifies who is being talked to and what each person can do. From the system’s point of view, the session is important in allocating resources for users (such as CPU resources) and network resources (such as phone and video connections). From a designer’s perspective, a session is an important concept because of the need to display session information to the user and control access to the session.