BigBlueButton 1.1 Released

[Fred Dixon]

We are pleased to announce the release of BigBlueButton 1.1.

BigBlueButton is an open source web conferencing system for online learning.  It provides the instructor with real-time sharing of audio, video, slides, chat, polls, emojis, and screen.  BigBlueButton can record and playback sessions for later viewing.

With our focus on online leaning, many learning management systems have integrated BigBlueButton into their products using the BigBlueButton API (see http://docs.bigbluebutton.org/dev/api.html).  For example, the plugin stats at moodle.org show over 4000 sites using the BigBlueButton plugin for Moodle (see https://moodle.org/plugins/mod_bigbluebuttonbn).

Major features in this release include:

Breakout Rooms - Instructors can now group students into breakout rooms for increased collaboration. Instructors can monitor activity in the breakout rooms set a time limit for collaboration.

Closed Captioning - BigBlueButton now enables a stenographer to provide live closed captions in multiple languages during a session. After the session finishes, the captions will appear as subtitles in the recording.

Faster Screen Sharing - Screen sharing now is faster, works across all browsers (using a Java application that launches outside the browser), and captures the cursor.

GreenLight - Administrators can install a new front-end, called GreenLight, that makes it easy for users to quickly creating meetings, invite others, and manage recordings on a BigBlueButton server. GreenLight is written in Rails 5 and can be easily customized by any rails developer.

Ubuntu 16.04 packages - This release installs on Ubuntu 16.04 64-bit (the most recent long-term support release from Canonical). This release also uses systemd for new start/stop scripts of individual components.

For details see

  http://docs.bigbluebutton.org/overview/overview.html

For install instructions see

  http://docs.bigbluebutton.org/install/install.html

We recommend anyone running an earlier version of BigBlueButton to setup a new Ubuntu 16.04 64-bit server, install this latest version, and copy over any previous recordings (see the above install documentation for details).  

We want to thank everyone in the community who helped us test this release.  This has been, by far, our most heavily tested release (some organizations ran over a quarter of a million meetings on the beta version alone).  

The goal of the BigBlueButton project is to provide remote students a high-quality online learning experience. 

The release (our fifteenth so far in over eight years of development) is a significant step towards that goal.

Enjoy!

-- The BigBlueButton Team
https://bigbluebutton.org/

[Séverin TERRIER]

Nice and good news :-)

Thanks for all the good work done!