BigBlueButton Blog

BigBlueButton presentation at WebFWD Summit

2011-12-20T20:29:00.000-08:00

Fred Dixon, one of the BigBlueButton developers, has just returned from a three day WebFWD summit at Mozilla's offices in Mountain View, California.

Kudos to Pascal Finette and Diane Bisgeier for putting on a great summit for the WebFWD fellows and giving us many opportunities to learn from Mozilla, each other, and select companies in Silicon Valley how to create successful open source projects.

As part of the summit, each project had to give a presentation on their current status. The presentations were alaphabetical, so BigBlueButton went first. Here's a link to Fred's presentation.

BigBlueButton joins Mozilla's WebFWD program as a Fellow!

2011-12-06T15:47:00.001-08:00

WebFWD ("Web Forward") is part of Mozilla's Open Innovation program to support open source projects which help extend the web. As described on their web site:

WebFWD ("Web Forward") is Mozilla's Open Innovation program. We support Open Source projects which extend the Web — providing participants with mentorship from industry experts, access to the Mozilla global network, as well as infrastructure and other world-class resources.

The benefit to BigBlueButton's community is that our project now has one of the most experienced and successful open source companies helping us in our efforts to succeed. You've actually already seen some results with the integration of popcorn.js into BigBlueButton 0.8 to support HTML5 playback of recorded sessions.

WebFWD's announcement does not change the work ahead: we still need to design, development, test, and release future versions of BigBlueButton that get us closer to our 1.0 goal. But with Mozilla's help, the road ahead just got a little bit smoother.

See Mozilla's WebFWD announcement for more details.

BigBlueButton 0.8-beta-3 Released

2011-12-01T11:37:00.001-08:00

BigBlueButton 0.8-beta-3 is now released, our third beta in the development of BigBlueButton 0.8.

In addition to the usual bug fixes under the hood (see release announcement in the bigbluebutton-dev mailing list), we added a push-to-talk feature in this release so end users can now un-mute/mute themselves if needed.

We encourage anyone interested in BigBlueButton to download and check out this release.

Managing webcams the easy way

2011-11-14T13:27:00.001-08:00

The upcoming BigBlueButton 0.8-beta-3 is designed to manage multiple webcams by grouping them together into the Video Dock window.

The Video Dock window also let's a user click on any video stream to see a larger version of it alongside the others.

This is what 20 simultaneous webcams look like in BigBlueButton 0.8.

BBB-Mobile now available on Android Marketplace

2011-11-12T06:02:00.001-08:00

The hard working Mconf-Mobile team have announced a beta of their BigBlueButton Android client is now available on the Android Marketplace for download:

We are glad to announce that after 10 months of development we are releasing the first version of BBB-Android and Mconf-Mobile on the official Android marketplace. It's the version 0.4.2, and it comes with many improvements on stability.

BBB-Android is a native Android client for BigBlueButton, and Mconf-Mobile is a mobile client for Mconf (https://mconf.org), a BigBlueButton based web conferencing system. Users running the Android client will be able to interact with others by public and private chat messages and audio/video both ways.

If you have an android phone, we encourage you to download their BigBlueButton client, try it out, and give them feedback on their mconf-dev mailing list

Kudos to the Mconf-Mobile team for getting their BigBlueButton client on the Android Marketplace!

BigBlueButton spotted at EDUCAUSE

2011-11-07T05:37:00.000-08:00

Scott Siddall, managing director of Longsight, recently showcased BigBlueButton's integration with Sakai at EDUCAUSE 2011.

Longsight is also helping us update the Sakai Meeting Tool to support record and playback (see this post in sakai-dev).

BigBlueButton spotted at MAINEducation Conference

2011-11-04T13:03:00.000-07:00

Another BigBlueButton sighting: Stephen Dame from HostBBB recently demonstrated BigBlueButton at the MAINEducation Conference.

Goldsmiths University of London using BigBlueButton

2011-10-27T06:14:00.000-07:00

Mira Vogel, Goldsmiths University of London, recently shared their on-line documentation for supporting BigBlueButton. See How to use BigBlueButton (login as Guest).

Thanks Mira!

ATutor LCMS now integrated with BigBlueButton

2011-09-30T05:47:00.001-07:00

Greg Gay, community manager of the ATutor Learning Content Management System, recently announced the ATutor integration module for BigBlueButton is now avaialble.

Thanks Greg for the integration with BigBlueButton!

BigBlueButton + Matterhorn = Desktop Lecture Capture

2011-09-24T19:05:00.000-07:00

Here is the announced our integration with Matterhorn at opencast.org and published instructions on how to setup BigBlueButton for lecture capture with Matterhorn 1.1 and 1.2.

If you are using Matterhorn, invite you to try the integration and give us feedback.

BigBlueButton 0.8-beta released!

2011-09-12T14:56:00.000-07:00

The BigBlueButton development team is pleased to announce the BETA RELEASE of BigBlueButton 0.8.This release provides:

Recording of sessions
Playback of recordings in HTML 5
Improved Audio (lower latency)
Integration with Matterhorn (open source lecture capture management)

For the full details, see release notes. For installation on Ubuntu 10.04 32-bit or 64-bit server, see installation instructions.

We've also put together a YouTube video demonstration how to install this beta release.

Enjoy!

BigBlueButton uses popcorn.js for HTML5 playback of recordings

2011-09-09T14:10:00.000-07:00

Two words: popcorn.js rocks.

We've been working on adding record and playback to BigBlueButton 0.8 for months (we're almost ready for a beta). We had originally written our own HTML5 playback client for playback of slides + audio. This way, playback could occur within an HTML5 browser. By using HTML5, the playback would be very lightweight: just a series of PNG images and an OGG audio file.

Near the end of our development of 0.8, we were approached by Ben Moskowitz, a member of Mozilla Foundation, and asked if we were interested in using popcorn.js instead. popcorn.js is a javascript library for synchronized playback of media.

With the support of Mozilla, we converted over BigBlueButton to use popcorn.js (read: ditched our home grown client). The conversion went so well that we were able to add playback of chat messages.

Click the image below to see an example of playback of a recorded BigBlueButton session using popcorn.js.

Thanks to popcorn.js and the Mozilla Foundation, folks can leverage popcorn.js when remixing and creating new output formats for BigBlueButton recordings.

Presentation on Record and Playback with BigBlueButtton

2011-09-08T18:45:00.001-07:00

Two of the BigBlueButton developers, Richard Alam and Fred Dixon, gave a talk at SC2011 - Software Developers' Haven, an open source conference held in Ottawa, Ontario, on August 27, 2011.

They presented the architecture and implementation of record and playback in the upcoming BigBlueButton 0.8.

At the time of the presentation BigBlueButton 0.8-beta had not yet shipped, but it will soon!

Short review of BigBlueButton in Classroom 2.0

2011-08-21T05:42:00.000-07:00

The website Classroom 2.0 recently posted an article 9 Web Conferencing Platforms for Education and Collaboration 2.0: What Should Your Organization Use?

In the review, Nicholas Carl Martin wrote about BigBlueButton

It offers the basic features described at the beginning of the post and also employs video conferencing between the presenter and viewers. It lacks recording and mobile integration, but is on a good track and is highly recommended for organizations that have a good handle on tech and want a cost-effective and easy-to-use option.

In regards to the missing parts, the GT-Mconf team working on an android client, and we have record and playback coming in BigBlueButton 0.8-beta.

BigBlueButton 0.8 beta is coming soon!

BigBlueButton Developer Summit on Sunday, August 28, 11AM - 2PM EDT

2011-08-19T07:53:00.000-07:00

The BigBlueButton developers will be holding a three hour on-line developer summit on Sunday, August 28, 11AM - 2PM EDT.

For information on agenda and registration see this announcement in our developer mailing list.

The on-line sessions will be held with BigBlueButton itself (of course!). A recording of the sessions will be available after the summit.

Video showing record and playback in BigBlueButton 0.8 (internal build)

2011-07-24T18:05:00.001-07:00

We've made this YouTube video showing the recording of a presentation (slides + audio) and its playback within BigBlueButton 0.8.

The video was taken of an internal build of BigBlueButton 0.8. It shows the core APIs are in place to record a presentation, get past recordings, publish/unpublish recordings, and delete recordings.

BigBlueButton at Sakai 2011

2011-07-01T07:04:00.001-07:00

Omar Shammas and Fred Dixon recently attended the Sakai 2011 User Conference in Los Angeles to demonstrate the latest version of BigBlueButton.

We showed the upcoming integration with Matterhorn 1.1 and an build of BigBlueButton 0.8 with record and playback. We also held a BoF (Birds of a Feather) session to answer questions about the project.

The Sakai community puts on a very good show. This was our second year attending. Last year, we estimate about 20% of attendees had heard about BigBlueButton. This year, the number was around 60%.

The conference was an excellent opportunity to talk directly to universities and colleges who had already deployed BigBlueButton and share our road map. Looking forward to attending the Sakai 2012 conference!

Omar recently created the localization server at http://localize.bigbluebutton.org. See previous blog post. Fred is one of the BigBlueButton committers.

BigBlueButton Android client now supports video

2011-06-06T04:40:00.000-07:00

The GT-Mconf team recently demonstrated at Campo Grande-Brazil an updated version of their BigBlueButton Android client supporting video.

Here's a screen shot:

More screenshots available here.

They also gave a presentation of their progress to date. In his post to bigbluebutton-dev, Felipe Cecagno said their plans are to release the next version within the Android marketplace.

Can't wait to see it -- time to buy an android phone!

Easier localization of BigBlueButton

2011-05-10T13:42:00.000-07:00

Thanks to contributions from our community, BigBlueButton is now localized in over thirty (30) languages.

This is awesome, but it's also a lot of work to keep up-to-date, especially as the number of language strings increase with each release, and as the developers must review each update before commit.

To make it easier for our community (and our developers), we've adapted the localize server from the Drupal to create

http://localize.bigbluebutton.org/

Here's a screen shot of localize.bigbluebutton.org:

We created a YouTube Video to show how easy it is to contribute to localizing the language strings.

Finally, we integrated the localization server with our GitHub account to automatically push updates to the language strings into souce. See the announcement in bigbluebutton-org for more information.

Thanks to Xie, Chen, and DJP for their initial effort to localization BigBlueButton. You guys made it possible for us to reach 30 languages.

First public release of BigBlueButton client for Android by GT-Mconf team

2011-05-08T08:30:00.000-07:00

The GT-Mconf team, working in the Laboratory of Prav (located in the Institute of Informatics, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil), have reached another milestone in creating a BigBlueButton Android client.

Felipe Cecagno posted the availability of the first public release for download. This release supports both chat and voice.

Here's a list of participants in the session and in the voice conference:

Here's a view of the client in landscape mode:

We downloaded their client a within a few minutes were using our android phones to listen and speak in a BigBlueButton conference. Very cool!

For further links, check out Felipe's post to bigbluebutton-dev.

This is great progress Felipe. Getting voice working is a BIG milestone.

Lessons from an Open Source Business

2011-05-05T12:51:00.000-07:00

Fred Dixon, one of the BigBlueButton developers, recently published an article in the Open Source Business Resource titled Lessons from an Open Source Business.

The article reflects on the past three three years of developing and building BigBlueButton, the BigBlueButton ecosystem, and growing a business around providing commercial support for BigBlueButton.

Early days of BigBlueButton

2011-04-23T10:11:00.000-07:00

We recently came across this picture of a drawing by Richard Alam made during a presentation on the architecture of BigBlueButton in 2008.

Since then, BigBlueButton has been in active development for over three years, but you can see the familiar pieces of red5, asterisk, pdf2swf and others are still there.

Jeff Miles Reviews BigBlueButton

2011-04-13T11:26:00.000-07:00

Jeff Miles recently posted this review of BigBlueButton on his blog. He made lots of good comments on BigBlueButton, but for us this one stood out:

I only ran into a couple problems (audio application freeswitch didn’t install correctly) but the documentation wiki was very helpful in getting those problems resolved. Overall the support resources are excellent.

Writing good documentation isn't easy sometimes, but comments like Jeff's that it worth the effort.

Dean Mantz is happy

2011-04-04T15:11:00.000-07:00

Recently Dean Mantz gave a big shout out to the volunteers in the BigBlueButton Setup mailing list for their assistance. Here's an excerpt from his post:

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to those responsible for BBB ... in setting up a brand new server ... I ran into a couple problems. In assisting me, Fred remoted into my Ubuntu server found the issues and had me up and running within 15 minutes....as advertised!

Therefore, if you are having folks question you why BBB and what type of support will be provided they will be quite pleased to know I would place Fred and the BBB family up against any franchise in the business!!

Thanks Dean! We care about making sure people are successful when using BigBlueButton.

BigBlueButton running on Galaxay Tablet

2011-03-17T20:53:00.000-07:00

Thanks to filipmares for sharing this pic.

BigBlueButton day in Montréal: March 8th 2011

2011-03-06T05:33:00.000-08:00

Developers and enthusiasts of BigBlueButton will meet up in Montréal, Québec, Canada on March 8th, 2011.

This will permit to accelerate the development of the local BigBlueButton community and will be held at the offices of Savoir-faire Linux. Révolution Linux, Gestion-Ressources, Evocatio and AvanTech.net will be present. The event will be 9AM to 5PM EST and topics will include:

Introductions by Fred Dixon and Denis Zgonjanin- BigBlueButton developers
BigBlueButton Presentation
- Current features
- New features
- Use cases
- Integration with various other applications
Discussion about BigBlueButton business models
Improvements and feature requests
General discussions

This event is the last day of TikiFestConfoo 2011 and just before the Confoo Web Conference, where Tiki will be presented.

Thanks to Marc Laporte, project admin for Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware, for providing the information for this post.

BigBlueButton sighted at ITC eLearning 2011

2011-03-03T20:08:00.003-08:00

Fred Dixon (Blindside Networks) and Mario Saenz (Generic Conferencing) recently demonstrated BigBlueButton to members of the Instructional Technology Council eLearning 2011 conference (Feb 19 - 22, St. Pete Beach, Florida).

Members got a preview of the upcoming implementation of Record and Playback in BigBlueButton 0.8.

BigBlueButton on Android Phone

2011-02-09T15:05:00.000-08:00

Felipe Cecagno, a member of the GT-Mconf team working in the Laboratory of Prav (located in the Institute of Informatics, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) posted this message to bigbluebutton-dev giving an update on their progress to create an Android client for BigBlueButton.

Progress is good. They posted this YouTube Video showing a working prototype (chat is now implemented).

Their project is open source:

Kudos to Felipe and his team! You have really impressed us!

With an Android client now in play, could an iPhone client be far behind?

Southern Methodist University

2011-02-04T05:53:00.000-08:00

Steve Sekul, an Assistant Professor of Experimental Particle Physics at Southern Methodist University, shares his thoughts on using BigBlueButton for a Virtual Classroom.

Thanks for sharing you thoughts Steve. There's a good discussion in his post re: Flash vs. HTML5.

Real-time Chat Translation in BigBlueButton

2011-01-25T07:43:00.000-08:00

We've posted a video to YouTube showing a demo of real-time chat translation in BigBlueButton 0.71a using Google Translate.

σε πραγματικό χρόνο μετάφραση είναι δροσερό.

Moodle 2.0 Activity Module available for BigBlueButton

2011-01-17T13:23:00.000-08:00

Blindside Networks has released a BigBlueButton activity module for Moodle 1.9 and Moodle 2.0.

There is an overview video of how the modules work. You can download them from here.

Be sure to check out the Moodle 1.9 Activity Module from Dual Code as well available from here.

BigBlueButton 0.71a released

2011-01-13T19:36:00.000-08:00

We spent about six weeks profiling and testing the server code. The end result: better handling of VoIP packets and lower memory usage on the server.

See documentation to install or upgrade.

DimDim acquired by Salesforce.com

2011-01-06T19:21:00.001-08:00

DimDim is ending contributions to their open source project.

If the acquisition of DimDim makes you think the open source web conferencing market is shrinking, it's not. It's actually growing.

A successful open source project is not just about software, it's about building a healthy ecosystem in which users, companies, and developers all finding benefits in contributing to improving BigBlueButton.

Take a look through our growing developer mailing lists. Do a twitter search on BigBlueButton. Check out our open source integrations. Or set your own BigBlueButton server (it will take you about fifteen minutes if you have a spare computer with Ubuntu 10.04 32-bit or 64-bit), or try our demo server.

You see that BigBlueButton is growing and giving you a real open source choice.

DimDim is going away, but BigBlueButton is here to stay.

BigBlueButton on FLOSS Weekly

2011-01-06T19:09:00.000-08:00

The FLOSS Weekly show (TWiT Netcast Network) just posted an interview with Fred Dixon, one of BigBlueButton's developers.

They used skype for the interview ... maybe we can convince them to switch to BigBlueButton in the future.

bigbluebutton-dev hits 700 members

2010-12-09T14:20:00.000-08:00

Back in July 2008, the bigbluebutton-dev mailing list had just 3 members.

Today, as of 5:19 PM EST, we just accepted our 700th member.

The peak traffic for bigbluebutton-dev was 977 posts in March, 2010. Shortly afterwards we created two new groups: bigbluebutton-users and bigbluebutton-setup to reduce the traffic. bigbluebutton-dev now averages between 200-400 messages/month.

It's been a lot of growth in the last 29 months. Any bets on which month we'll reach 1000 members?

BigBlueButton sighted at Quebec Open Source conference

2010-12-06T13:47:00.000-08:00

One of our BigBlueButton partners snapped this picture of a BigBlueButton sighting at Salon Du Logiciel Libre Du Québec that is happening now.

More BigBlueButton sighting pictures welcome!

BigBlueButton Extension for Joomla

2010-11-26T10:16:00.000-08:00

Blindside Networks has developed a BigBlueButton Extension for Joomla, which is an open source content management system.

The extension, which can be found here, uses the BigBlueButton API to enable Joomla administrators to create and manage on-line meetings rooms to interact with their readers. Using the extension, the administrator can create, join, end and delete meetings, while readers can join meetings through a module located on the frontpage.

We now have BigBlueButton support for both Wordpress and Joomla.

193 Simultaneous Users

2010-11-22T14:33:00.000-08:00

Generic Conferencing just held a stress test for BigBlueButton 0.71. In his forum post, Jeremy Thomerson wrote "The more the merrier."

At one point we peaked at 193 simultaneous users. There were 45 users in the voice conference, with one user speaking (the rest were muted). Shortly after 193rd user joined, we tried to upload a new presentation and the server stopped responding.

Earlier, we tried opening as many web cams as possible. We achieve 20 simultaneous web cams in a session.

We're very happy to see BigBlueButton 0.71 support this many users on the server at once.

Keep in mind, we don't recommend to anyone to run BigBlueButton with 193 users in a single room, but to know it's possible was pretty cool.

BigBlueButton 0.71 is Released

2010-11-10T05:21:00.000-08:00

BigBlueButton 0.71 is released.

The biggest changes were in improvements to VoIP, selectable area for desktop sharing, and real-time chat translation using Google Translate. See Release Notes for the details.

You can install 0.71 using packages on Ubuntu 10.04 32-bit/64-bit or download BigBlueButton 0.71 VM.

There is a very determined core group of developers who are committed to constantly improving the quality of this open source project. Our goal is to create the leading open source web conferencing system for distance education.

0.71 is another step towards that goal.

Pressing the BigBlueButton

2010-11-01T17:15:00.000-07:00

Fred Dixon, a member of the BigBlueButton development team, recently spoke at the Free Software and Open Source Symposium 2010.

His talk, Pressing the BigBlueButton, explored some of the team's experiences in user interface design, development, testing, packaging, documentation, community, and their plans to create a BigBlueButton Foundation.

A video of the presentation is now available on-line (33 minutes).

Enjoy.

Ubuntu packages for BigBlueButton 0.71-beta now available

2010-10-26T02:37:00.001-07:00

Got a spare Ubuntu 10.04 32-bit/64-bit server? Want to try out the latest BigBlueButton 0.71-beta?

See installing BigBlueButton 0.71-beta an Ubuntu. It takes less than ten commands and installs in less than fifteen minutes.

When 0.71 is released, you'll be able to upgrade 0.71-beta to 0.71 final with two commands: sudo apt-get update/sudo apt-get upgrade. We love apt-get.

Foswiki now integrates with BigBlueButton

2010-10-26T00:50:00.000-07:00

Arnie Joris recently created a BigBlueButton extension for Foswiki, a wiki-based collaboration platform.

According to the description on the extensions page,

The plugin will automatically create these meeting rooms on the BBB server, creates a wiki topic for each meeting room (a room named Lotus will be described in topic LotusConferenceRoom) and provides macros to join meetings and see who's in them

Yet another open source integration using the BigBlueButton API.

Installing BigBlueButton on FreeBSD/PC-BSD

2010-09-26T04:56:00.000-07:00

In the Official PC-BSD Blog, Dru Lavigne, Director of Community Development, blogs about the initial steps for setting up BigBlueButton on a FreeBSD or PC-BSD 8.1 system.

In the blog she wrote:

Once better tested, we’ll see what we can do about getting a BSD version of BBB. Creating a port/PBI will be interesting due to the amount of configuration.

We know the value of making pre-configured packages ... once its easy to install BigBlueButton on a specific platform, it tends to spread quickly.

Steve Boneham's Review of BigBlueButton

2010-09-22T17:42:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Steve Boneham -- a consultant that offers research, development and training in web design, podcasting, digital video, social media & e-Learning -- for his very detailed review of BigBlueButton.

In his review he wrote:

The interface feels slick and less clunky than some other systems I’ve used.

We're trying to keep the interface really simple.

He also wrote:

At present, there is no way to record and playback sessions ... this is the most requested feature and is planed to ship with v0.8, although as with much OSS, the timescales for that aren’t set in stone.

We're working hard on record and playback. Stay tuned!

Comments from Chris Kenniburg

2010-09-01T15:03:00.000-07:00

Chris Kenniburg, Web Master for Dearborn Schools (Dearborn, MI), checked out our beta WordPress plugin for BigBlueButton and in this recent blog post he wrote:

The BigBlueButton (BBB) web meeting/conferencing server is truly a gem in the open source arena. It installs effortlessly via a few simple console commands on Ubuntu and updates even easier.

Chris went on to say:

For a K-12 school district looking to offer web meetings without a big budget, BBB works GREAT!

Thanks Chris for the endorsement. We've built BigBlueButton for the distance education market, so in many ways we've built it for you!

BigBlueButton Video from Lancaster University

2010-09-01T14:43:00.000-07:00

Dr Alastair Robertson, a research fellow in e-Science, Lancaster University Management School, has posted to YouTube a video showing how to use BigBlueButton in conjunction with Sakai 2.7.

Nice video Alastair!

Breakout Rooms in 0.71

2010-09-01T10:46:00.000-07:00

A new feature appearing in BigBlueButton 0.71 will be the ability to create breakout rooms. A moderator in the meeting will be able to select users and redirect them to a new meeting room with just a few clicks.

This is useful in a situation where, for example, a professor wants to split a class up into smaller discussion groups.

The new module uses the BigBlueButton Integration API.

Pictures from TikiFest/BigBlueButton

2010-08-19T04:26:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Natasha D'Souza from Virtual Eye See for posting her pictures taken at last night's TikiFest/BigBlueButton event.

The photos are available here.

This event was a celebration after the Tiki developers held a code sprint to extend their integration with BigBlueButton.

TikiWiki / BigBlueButton Wine and Cheese

2010-08-07T06:58:00.000-07:00

The core TikiWiki development team is hosting a TikiWiki / BigBlueButton Wine and Cheese event at the Code Factory, 246 Queen Street, Ottawa, Ontario Canada on Wednesday August 18th at 6PM. Everyone is welcome!

A number of the core BigBlueButton developers will be attending (Richard Alam, Fred Dixon, and Denis Zgonjanin).

We'll look at broadcasting the event using BigBlueButton so others can join in.

BigBlueButton at Wikimania 2010

2010-07-30T09:07:00.000-07:00

Marc Laporte, the project admin for Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware, talked about the integration of BigBlueButton with TikiWiki during his session at Wikimania 2010.

This is a photo that someone took of the note for the session.

Community support for BigBlueButton

2010-07-30T08:56:00.001-07:00

Many large companies will inquire about support for BigBlueButton, but we also try to help the smaller companies with community support in the mailing lists.

Here's a recent post by DonDon Schulz, head of the non-profit Real Life Education, Inc., after successfully solving some asterisk problems in his BigBlueButton setup.

So thank you to everyone that helped me get to this point. I wanted to shout out to the BigBlueButton team ;) !! because they went beyond the call of duty for an open source program.

Glad we could help Don.

Dearborn Schools using BigBlueButton

2010-07-30T08:50:00.000-07:00

Chris Kenniburg posts he is looking forward to record and playback in 0.8.

Chris, we might sneak a 0.71 version out before 0.8. But we definitely agree that adding record and playback to BigBlueButton is the #1 requested feature by schools.

eFront Integration

2010-07-23T06:34:00.000-07:00

The developers over at eFront have just released a BigBlueButton integration module for eFront. While we haven't used eFront ourselves yet, this seems like a good opportunity to check it out. The integration looks well done and is certainly well documented. You can find it here.

BigBlueButton at Campus Technology 2010

2010-07-19T05:18:00.000-07:00

Denis Zgonjanin and I are going to be demonstrating BigBlueButton the next few days at Campus Technology 2010, an educational technology conferencing now being held in Boston, MA from July 19-21st.

The conference is located in the Seaport World Trade Center. You can find us exhibiting in booth #829 (Blindside Networks).

We're staying close by the Renaissance Hotel Boston, so if you are not attending but close by and wanted to meet up, just e-mail me directly and we can arrange a time/location.

BigBlueButton 0.7 is released

2010-07-16T05:28:00.000-07:00

The primary goal of BigBlueButton is to enable remote students to have a high-quality learning experience.

After fourteen weeks of development, untold number of cups of coffee, and a lengthy testing period, the BigBlueButton Development Team is proud to announce the release of BigBlueButton 0.7.

The biggest feature in this release is definitely the integrated whiteboard.

See tutorial videos, and see the BigBlueButton project at Google Code to download and setup your own BigBlueButton server.

Desktop Sharing is now LGPL V3

2010-07-14T16:33:00.000-07:00

As of BigBlueButton 0.7, the license for the desktop sharing module will be Limited GNU Public License V3.

Enjoy.

BigBlueButton Foundation

2010-07-12T10:08:00.000-07:00

As many of you know, almost all successful open source projects have an independent foundation overseeing its growth. Good examples are the Sakai Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, and Mozilla Foundation.

In a similar manner, for the BigBlueButton project, we are planning to setup an independent not-for-profit company (a foundation) to accelerate the growth and adoption of the BigBlueButton.

The plans to create a foundation have been in the works for a few months, but given the recent activity in the market, we wanted to let our community know our intent.

While we can’t use the term “Foundation” here in Canada, BigBlueButton Inc. will be a membership based organization that will elect a board of directors, which, in turn, will elect an Executive Director. BigBlueButton Inc. will hold the license for the source code, the trademark for “BigBlueButton”, and represent the members as it carries out its mission, currently drafted as follows:

BigBlueButton Inc. is a vendor-neutral, non-profit company, whose mission is to double the value of remote students’ academic experiences and reduce the cost of institutions responsible for delivering these experiences by 50%.
BigBlueButton Inc. accomplishes its mission by becoming a keystone of a business ecosystem that provides strategic advantages to its members. The goal is to help remote students succeed academically and academic institutions and businesses succeed commercially worldwide.

If you are interested in knowing giving feedback or participating in the foundation, don’t hesitate to contact me at ffdixon at bigbluebutton dot org.

D'Arcy checks out BigBlueButton

2010-07-09T20:01:00.000-07:00

D'Arcy Norman gives his impressions of trying out BigBlueButton. Once observation he made:

What is missing in BigBlueButton is ... the ability to record meetings/classes for later playback.

Yes, once we release BigBlueButton 0.7 (with integrated whiteboard), we'll be focusing our efforts to implementing record and playback.

Well Played, Blackboard

2010-07-08T20:54:00.000-07:00

In his recent article Well Played, Blackboard, George Siemens suggests that BigBlueButton should work closely with other non-blackboard companies to offer the market choices.

We agree.

Keeping an eye on BigBlueButton

2010-07-08T20:49:00.000-07:00

In this blog post about the recent Blackboard acquisition of Wimba and Elluminate, Geoff Cain wrote

I will be watching Blackboard closely on how they work with Elluminate while keeping a weather eye on BigBlueButton (which, coincidentally integrates with Sakai) and other open source options.

We'll be keeping our eye on BigBlueButton too!

Commercial or Open Source?

2010-07-07T15:27:00.000-07:00

Blackboard announced today they are acquiring Elluminate and Wimba, two major software vendors it the virtual conferencing space, for $116 million in cash. Michael Chasen, President and Chief Executive of Blackboard, said:

Elluminate's and Wimba's technologies are expected to grow "as institutions look for cost-effective ways to encourage social learning and support learning interactions of all kinds."

The part about "cost-effective" obviously relates to other commercial products. But what does this acquisition mean for open source-based learning solutions?

In a letter to Blackboard's customers, Michael goes on to say:

We will continue current Elluminate and Wimba integration work for open source products, and it is our strategy to sustain those bridges with other commercial LMS providers as well.

Blackboard clearly wants to continue to sell its commercial web conferencing solutions to universities and colleges that are already using open source solutions (such as Moodle and Sakai). Which is fine, every company has to make money.

But what if universities and colleges had an open source web solution that integrated with Moodle and Sakai?

What if they had a really good open source alternative that offered real-time collaboration, virtual classrooms, and enabled any student anywhere in the world to have a high-quality learning experience?

What if that alternative was truly an open source project, not just in name, but in the way it has supported its global community of users and developers over the past two years.

And what if that alternative that was backed by not one company, but by a global community of companies all improving the software for the benefit of everyone?

That’s what we’re working hard to provide with BigBlueButton.

We believe that the real-time learning space will explode in the next two years as networks get faster, access spreads to remote students, and universities and colleges increasingly become global educational intuitions.

We believe that just as other open source projects have provided world-class databases, web browsers, and operating systems, the BigBlueButton open source project can provide a world-class web conferencing system for distance education.

We believe that universities and colleges who are building on open source solutions will also want the choice of a solid, tested, and supported open source solution for real-time distance education.

We want to give them that choice with BigBlueButton.

Sakai User Conference Report

2010-06-23T04:14:00.000-07:00

Fred Dixon and Denis Zgonjanin, two employees of Blindside Networks, demonstrated BigBlueButton last week to the over 400+ conference attendees in Denver, Colorado.

The buzz around BigBlueButton began on the first day when it was featured during the developer bootcamp sessions as "a showcase example" of a how to integrate with Sakai (thanks again to Nuno Fernandes and Adrian Fish for their first-class Sakai Integration for BigBlueButton).

When showing BigBlueButton, we started off each demo with the phrase "While are many commercial web conferencing systems, we are trying to build for you a good open source alternative for distance education."

We received lots of positive feedback and kudos on the BigBlueButton project, which reflected very well on all the committers who have been working hard on this project over the past three years.

It was our first exposure to the Sakai community, and the community is very strong. In particular, we enjoyed meeting with Scott Siddall and the others from Longsight who are exploring offering BigBlueButton directly to their customers. We look forward to working with them and attending future Sakai conferences and events!

BigBlueButton will be at the Sakai User Conference in Denver, June 15-17

2010-06-08T17:49:00.000-07:00

Two members of Blindside Networks, Denis Zgonjanin and Fred Dixon, will be demonstrating BigBlueButton at the 2010 Sakai User Conference in Denver June 15-17.

If you are attending the conference and would like to meet, contact us or drop by our booth.

Whiteboard Video

2010-06-07T05:30:00.001-07:00

We've created a new overview video showing how the whiteboard works in BigBlueButton 0.7.

The video is available for viewing here.

Less is More

2010-06-05T21:32:00.000-07:00

Paul Left, an educational writer in NZ, wrote that BigBlueButton

... appears to have fewer features but it has enough to be a very effective tool for synchronous learning and teaching

Paul, we're trying hard to keep everything simple and straightforward!

BigBlueButton on trial at EDC

2010-06-04T18:51:00.000-07:00

Carleton University's Educational Development Center blogged about their trial use of BigBlueButton this summer.

Sakai Integration with BigBlueButton

2010-05-27T11:43:00.001-07:00

Thanks to Nuno Fernandes and Adrian Fish for their recent release of a Sakai Integration for BigBlueButton.

Here's a link to the project's page.

BigBlueButton Stress Test reaches over 160 Simultaneous Users

2010-05-11T06:12:00.000-07:00

In a recent Stress Test, the BigBlueButton community achieved over one hundred and sixty (160) simultaneous users in a session. The screen shot to the right shows a user viewing eight other webcams during the stress test.

You can see a full report of the stress test in this post to bigbluebutton-dev. (A PDF file showing bandwidth and CPU usage is available in the same post.)

This test was done using BigBlueButton 0.64.

Ultimate Jaunty Server Setup

2010-05-09T06:01:00.000-07:00

Perspectoff, the editor for Ubuntu Guide, has written the Ultimate Jaunty Server setup guide, which includes instructions for setting up a BigBlueButton server.

Nice to know we were worthy enough to be included in an Ultimate guide.

Communications Enabled CRM

2010-05-08T11:39:00.000-07:00

In the May issue of the Open Source Business Resource, Elias Majic describes his use of BigBlueButton with vTiger in his article Communications Enabled Customer Relationship Management.

OpenSolaris Governance Board checks out BigBlueButton

2010-05-08T04:21:00.001-07:00

The OpenSolaris Governance Board recently posted this screenshot of using BigBlueButton for one of their governance meetings.

Preview of Whiteboard

2010-05-03T15:47:00.001-07:00

One of THE MOST requested features for BigBlueButton has been the addition of an integrated whiteboard.

We've been working on this for a while now, and ... wait for it... Denis checked in the first iteration of the whiteboard code into our Google Code repository this morning.

You can try it yourself on our development build server. Whiteboard works as annotations to a presentation, so you need to upload a presentation and make yourself presenter. If you've not used BigBlueButton before as a presenter, see this overview video (3 minutes).

Here's a screen shot of the artistic work on a slide.

Whiteboard will be released as part of the current BigBlueButton 0.7 iteration.

If you try it out, give us your feedback as a reply to Denis's announcement of Whiteboard.

Welcome Summer of Code Students

2010-04-30T05:51:00.000-07:00

We'd like to welcome two new committers to the bigbluebutton team. Neeraj Kumar and Marko Calderon will be working on BigBlueButton this summer, and hopefully a long time after that as well.

Neeraj is a senior undergrad from Indian Institute Of Technology, Varanasi. He'll be working mostly on the client side to improve the UI and implement new functionality such as Chat Translation, and Video Co-Viewing.

Marko is in his final year studying Computer Engineering at ESPOL University in Ecuador. He submitted a compelling proposal on implementing the much sought-after Record&Playback functionality in BigBlueButton.

New Tutorial Videos: Viewer and Presenter

2010-04-25T16:23:00.001-07:00

We've created two new tutorial videos for BigBlueButton. The first video shows you how to use BigBlueButton as a Student (Viewer). It covers chat, joining the voice conference, sharing your web cam, and resizing windows.

The second video shows how to present information using BigBlueButton. It includes how to upload slides, make another user presenter, mute/un-mute listeners, and share your desktop.

The videos all have a table of contents, so it's easy to jump to a specific topic.

Eight Simultaneous Web Cams

2010-04-17T17:41:00.002-07:00

Yeah.

It's possible with BigBlueButton.

TikiWiki integrating BigBlueButton into their CMS/Groupware project

2010-04-17T07:47:00.000-07:00

Mark Laporte, the project leader for TikiWiki, a very powerful open source CMS/Groupware project, recently proposed integrating BigBlueButton into TikiWiki as part of their eLearning strategy.

Looks like the proposal is getting a lot of support on the TikiWiki developer mailing list.

Coverage in OStatic

2010-04-13T04:45:00.000-07:00

Lisa Hoover just published an article on BigBlueButton Brings Video Conferencing to Classrooms in OStatic, a GigaOM network site.

When we were recently covered by Web Resources Depot, our traffic really spiked.

Looking forward to seeing the magnitude of the GigaOM-effect.

BigBlueButton 0.64 Released

2010-04-13T04:41:00.000-07:00

We've released BigBlueButton 0.64 (code named Lickety-split).

This release increased the scalability and speed of desktop sharing, added finer-grain listener management, and new additions to the API. For more information see Release Notes.

Chris's summary of BigBlueButton

2010-03-22T06:48:00.000-07:00

Our mission is to make BigBlueButton the best web conferencing system for distance education.

In his Web Master Dearborn Schools blog, Chris Kenniburg gave his assessment of our progress so far:

[BigBlueButton] is a video meeting/conferencing software package that is integrated with Moodle. ... It is a very complex program but the developers have made the user controls very simple. This is by far the best video/voice communication tool for Moodle.

Thanks Chris -- looks like we are on the right track.

Google Supports BigBlueButton

2010-03-18T13:40:00.000-07:00

The BigBlueButton open source project has been accepted into the 2010 Google Summer of Code!

You can see us in the accepted list.

We're looking forward to working with the GSoC students to improve BigBlueButton. (Here the list of projects ideas that we submitted for the application.)

Let the coding begin!

We're Big in Russia

2010-03-12T04:17:00.000-08:00

As BigBlueButton becomes localized into other languages, we see a huge spike in traffic from other countries.

Most folks in the chat session this morning are from Russia. Looks like we got covered in habrahabr.ru.

Free Technology For Teachers

2010-03-09T16:13:00.000-08:00

Some good coverage of BigBlueButton in theFree Technology For Teachers blog -- though we tend to characterize the project as open source web conferencing as opposed to open source video conferencing.

Push the BigBlueButton

2010-03-09T16:00:00.000-08:00

Thanks Betsy for the good words on BigBlueButton.

Yes the BigBlueButton developers do occasionally hang out on the demo server.

We find it an excellent way to interact with users and get direct feedback.

Our demo server has been busy

2010-03-09T05:20:00.000-08:00

Here's a screen shot of activity this morning.

That's thirteen people from around the world logged into the server trying out BigBlueButton.

Cool!

Nice Screen Shot

2010-03-09T05:17:00.001-08:00

Here's a nice screen shot posted by a user of our demo server. (Link found on twitter.)

Chrome Extension

2010-03-05T05:39:00.000-08:00

Jeremy Thomerson, from GenericConf has created a Chrome extension that you can use to test the BigBlueButton API. Really nice and lightweight. Should be very helpful to anyone integrating BigBlueButton with their platform. Are you integrating with BigBlueButton? Post a comment, we want to hear from you!

Comment on BigBlueButton

2010-03-02T13:14:00.001-08:00

Thanks jubiz for your comment.

Integrating with Sakai

2010-03-02T13:08:00.001-08:00

Do you use Sakai? Adrian Fish is working on integrating BigBlueButton with the Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment. See Adrain's post.

It just works

2010-02-20T07:17:00.000-08:00

See this recent blog post by the webmaster at Dearborn Schools on his experiences with using BigBlueButton.

BigBlueButton is now listed on the Asterisk Exchange

2010-02-09T06:58:00.000-08:00

Digium, the company behind Asterisk, has added a listing for BigBlueButton in their Asterisk Exchange (link). Asterisk is the open source PBX that powers the voice conferencing system in BigBlueButton.

The message to all companies using Asterisk: if you offering voice solutions using Asterisk, check out BigBlueButton and explore offering web conferencing solutions as well!

HTML 5

2010-02-05T08:56:00.000-08:00

We're starting to look closer at the potential for HTML 5 provide as an option for BigBlueButton to provide rich multi-media interface in a pure HTML/Javascript environment.

http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/

While there will always be limitations in a new platform, and we know its early days, but HTML 5 is showing some promise for supporting the voice and video streams that would be needed for web conferencing. This is definitely worth investigating further.

BigBlueButton 0.63 Released!

2010-01-26T05:49:00.000-08:00

After about two weeks of testing and testing, BigBlueButton 0.63 is Released.

As with each release, you can download BigBlueButton as a fully working Virtual Machine that also doubles as a development environment.

We're very happy with this release. We had a number of external contributors help us, including Jeremy Thomerson, Xie Yan Qing, Chen Guangtao, and Jean-Philippe Guiot. Big Thanks to you guys -- we couldn't have shipped this without you.

Testing, Testing, Testing

2010-01-24T15:03:00.001-08:00

We are getting close to the release of BigBlueButton 0.63. Is it just us, or does it take a solid week to test the software, test the upgrades, update documentation, write release notes, and create tutorial videos?

Come to think of it, I think we've been doing the above for about two weeks. I'm wondering if this time will shorten as we go on. My experiences suggests not. :-).

A Twitter Post

2010-01-23T05:11:00.001-08:00

These tweets really validate to us that we're headed in the right direction.

We're just finishing 0.63 -- Hope Daem0nX likes this release as well.

On Twitter

2010-01-13T04:42:00.000-08:00

Since a blog is more for substantive posts, we've started to tweet on some of the incremental updates to BigBlueButton.

You can follow our tweets at http://twitter.com/bigbluebutton.

Don't worry, you'll still get all the important news on BigBlueButton from this blog. However, if you want to know when we've added a language file for the Netherlands, for example, you'll probably see that in a tweet.

We're covered in EdTechTalk

2009-12-21T11:30:00.000-08:00

We just listened to an audio broadcast EdTechTalk, a community of educators interested in discussing and learning about the uses of educational technology. They covered BigBlueButton in EdTechWeekly #147. You can hear them talk about the product at about 29:00 minutes into their broadcast.

http://edtechtalk.com/EdTechWeekly147

They were positive in our efforts to provide an integrated setup. They also correctly pointed out that we don't have record and playback in the system yet -- that's coming soon. Right now, we're focused on getting release 0.63 solid and finished. We've got plans for record and playback in the future, but we know from experience that we need to focus on the current release.

If 0.63 is good, then we'll have a solid base for adding record and playback in future iteration.

BigBlueButton 0.62 Released

2009-11-14T19:15:00.000-08:00

BigBlueButton 0.62 saw many improvements to desktop sharing. We're proud that it support desktop sharing from mac, pc, and unix systems.

Users will benefit from the faster desktop sharing, and developers will benefit from using the BigBlueButton VM as pre-configured development environment (it’s how we develop BigBlueButton internally).

See release notes for more information on this release and where to download and try it out.

BigBlueButton Sightings!

2009-11-05T17:57:00.000-08:00

It's always cool to see other people showing BigBlueButton.

This presentation was made during the Linux Day 2009 in Teramo, Italy. You can see the translated pages here.

The Monthly Release Cycle (or why it's not every two weeks)

2009-10-05T03:11:00.000-07:00

The days of a long release cycle are gone.

A year ago, we'd plan this big feature for BigBlueButton, estimate that it would take two months, then end up finishing in four months (twice as long). And while the feature was good, we felt we had somehow missed the mark.

During the past six months, we've released a new version almost every month. This is due to our adopting a more agile development process: two week sprints, daily stand ups, and putting everything in an issue tracking system. The funny part is, we initially wanted to release every two weeks, but we ended up releasing every four weeks (again, twice as long!).

That's OK. In looking closer at our release cycle, our extra effort is a mixture of (a) testing, (b) working on customer-oriented projects for integration of BigBlueButton (which tends to accelerate other features, which is good), and constant refactoring of existing code. All good stuff for a healthy open source project. So, externally, you'll see we now release every month, but internally we are trying to keep our efforts to two week iterations to account for the above.

If you want to see what's planned for our upcoming iteration for this month (October), check the issues tagged for BigBluebutton 0.62 release