Best way to allow attendees to verify that BigBlueButton will work for them

[Rob Oakes]

Dear BigBlueButton Developers,

My company is in the process of integrating BigBlueButton into a few of our products as a video conferencing option. As part of that effort, we're trying to figure out a procedure to allow for conference participants to verify that BigBlueButton will work for them prior to the beginning of the conference. This is important as many of our clients work at large corporations with very stringent security requirements, and there is a good probability that non-standard ports (and by that, I mean anything not 443 or 80) will be blocked.

Is there a tool for BigBlueButton that can look for Flash (and whether it is enabled in the browser), attempt to connect to the RTMP port on the server, etc. and provides a report on what is present and what is missing? Or is my best option going to be to have some type of test server and encourage users to connect and give it a shot?

As an example of what I'm looking for, please see https://rlabs.gurulabs.com/verify/. This is a utility that we use for our remote labs environment to ensure that the browser is supported, has websockets available, can connect to the appropriate hostnames/ports, and so forth.

If not, how complex might it be to develop such a thing? We have Java developers in house and I know that custom apps can be developed in Tomcat that leverage BigBlueButton components (or at least, your docs say so).

Cheers,

Rob Oakes

[Calvin Walton]

Hi Rob,

With the current version of BigBlueButton, we do have a test page
available which generates a report of possible issues. You can see it
live on our demo server:
http://demo.bigbluebutton.org/check/

The intended use here is primarily as a troubleshooting tool that a
technician can ask a user to run to find out what might be causing
issues - the UI isn't really great for users.

One option might be to have people test if BigBlueButton will work -
simply by having them join a BigBlueButton session! It's easy enough to
use the API to create one-off unrecorded sessions for a single user to
join and ensure that they can connect, their audio works (echo test),
etc. We've put a lot of work into the BigBlueButton experience to guide
users into getting a working connection in the client itself.

Calvin.

--
Calvin Walton <calvin...@kepstin.ca>
BigBlueButton Developer