BigBlueButton 0.81-beta released

[Fred Dixon]

We are pleased to announce the release of BigBlueButton 0.81-beta.

This release is a step towards 0.81 final, which will be our eleventh release to date.  This beta release reflects over twelve months of effort by many organizations and individuals (see below) to advance BigBlueButton in the areas of stability, usability, and functionality (in that order).  

Major contributing organizations for this release:

 

   Blindside Networks -- Core development, documentation, QA, and release management

   Mconf -- Layout manager and video dock

   Seneca College -- Accessibility support

BigBlueButton Committers for this release:

   Richard Alam - Lead Architect

   Marco Calderon - Server

   Felipe Cecagno - Client

   Fred Dixon - Project Manager

   Tiago Jacobs - red5

   Chad Pilkey - Client

   Gustavo Salazar - Record and Playback

Major Features: 

* Simplified interface - BigBlueButton now has a consolidated Users window for easier session management and a more consistent user interface (including updated skin and icons) to help new users get started quickly.

* Layout Manager - BigBlueButton now enables users to choose from a number of preset layouts to quickly adapt to different modes of learning.

* Recording of whiteboard and webcams - BigBlueButton now records for playback all the activity in the presentation window (whiteboard, mouse movements, and pan/zoom) and all webcams shared during a session.

* Text tool for whiteboard - Presenters can now annotate their slides with text.

* New APIs - The BigBlueButton API now includes the ability to dynamically configure each client on a per-user bases, thus enabling developers to configure the skin, layout, modules, etc. for each user.  There is also a JavaScript interface to control the client.

* Accessibility - BigBlueButton adds its accessibility by supporting screen readers such as JAWS (version 11+) and NVDA. A list of keyboard shortcuts have been added to make it easier to navigate through the interface using the keyboard.

* LTI Support - BigBlueButton is IMS Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) 1.0 compliant. This means any LTI consumer can integrate with BigBlueButton without requiring custom plug-ins.

* Mozilla Persona - The API demos now include examples of how to sign into a BigBlueButton session using Mozilla Persona.

* Support for LibreOffice 4.0 - BigBlueButton now uses LibreOffice 4.0 for conversion of of MS Office documents (upload of PDF is still recommend to provide best results).

* Updated components - BigBlueButton 0.81 is built on red5 1.0.2, FreeSWITCH (1.5.x), and grails 1.3.6.

Since the release of 0.80 we have closed over 140 issues (see: http://goo.gl/7LHSK).  

In testing 0.81-dev, we have hosted and monitored builds on demo.bigbluebutton.org and dev081.bigbluebutton.org for almost three months.   In May 2013, the on-line Moodle conference iMoot 2013 used a build of BigBlueButton 0.81-dev to host a four day (24 hours a day) conference with 64 presentations world-wide using BigBlueButton.  We have also tested 0.81-dev with integrations for Moodle, Sakai, Wordpress, and other 3rd party applications to ensure the API is backward compatible with 0.80.

Release notes:

  https://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton/wiki/ReleaseNotes

Tutorial videos:

  Moderator/Presenter Tutorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHTZvbL1NT4

  Viewer Tutorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS2lttmPi6A

Other videos:

  Developer overview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4C-rOd8bi6s

  LTI Integration: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSTGfvICYX4

To install BigBlueButton 0.81-beta (Ubuntu 10.04 64-bit), see

  https://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton/wiki/081InstallationUbuntu

What's left?  We need to close the remaining issues (see http://goo.gl/frxVz), update all the localization files, and create a BigBlueButton VM for 0.81.  Depending on our progress and feedback from the community, there will be either another beta release of 0.81 or we'll move directly to a release candidate. 

We want to thank all the members of our community that helped us test and gave feedback on earlier builds.   If you encounter *any* bugs using 0.81-beta, please let us know by either posting to bigbluebutton-dev or, if you have found a problem and (ideally) can provide steps to reproduce, open a new issue at https://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton/wiki/IssuesInstructions.

We believe any student with a web browser should have access to a high quality on-line learning experience.  We intend to make that possible using BigBlueButton.  This release is a significant step towards realizing that goal.  

Regards,... Fred

--
BigBlueButton Developer

http://bigbluebutton.org/
http://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton

BigBlueButton on twitter: @bigbluebutton

[David Park]

Thanks for BigBlueButton team.

0.81 -beta installed to my server and working fine.

But have some problems on using.

1. Moderator can kick presenter.-->I think Presenter can do this fucntion only.

2. Moderator can lock layout and change layout.-->I opinion is that Presenter can do this fuction and moderator can't see this icon on his windows.

3. If presenter log off and after relogin then can't camera setting, so play only 320x240.

4. Moderator take away presener.--> I think this function work at when presenter hand over his rights to moderator 

Regards, David.

2013/6/16 Fred Dixon <ffd...@gmail.com>

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[Fred Dixon]

Hi David,

Thanks for the feedback.  In BigBlueButton, there are two types of users: moderator and viewer.  The moderator may make any a presenter (including themselves).  Moderators have all the control.  Usually, a teacher joins as moderator and students join as viewers.  The teacher can make themselves or one of the students the presenter.  

For a video overview of how this works, see

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHTZvbL1NT4

> 3. If presenter log off and after relogin then can't camera setting, so play only 320x240.

Hmm ... can you give steps to reproduce using the demo server at http://demo.bigbluebutton.org/

Regards,... Fred

-- 
BigBlueButton Developer

http://bigbluebutton.org/
http://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton

BigBlueButton on twitter: @bigbluebutton

[Séverin TERRIER]

Hi,

Thanks Fred for this good news about this (long awaited) BigBlueButton 0.81 beta!

And thanks all contributors to make BBB better.

Not too much time to test (and finish french translation) it now... hope soon.

Séverin

[HostBBB.com]

Richard, Marco, Felipe, Fred, Tiago, Chad, Gustavo

On behalf of myself and clients that have successfully deployed BBB
commercially over the last few years I want to thank you for all your
hard work over the last year.

I thought of BigBlueButton when I saw this Open Source Process
Maturity Matrix for evaluating whether to use OSS in your projects
last week.

Its a no brainer when selecting BigBlueButton to get the job done!

Regards,
Stephen

Open Source Process Maturity Matrix

Product
•Age/Maturity – Look at news reports and projects website for details
on when the product was introduced, when it was available as a stable
release, etc.
•Momentum – Look at recent releases, number of articles in 3rd party
news, number of community members, time line for releases and how well
its been met in the past, etc.
•Features – Yes, take a look at your technical requirements and how
well the particular solution meets your needs.

Usability
•Install – Read or speak with references on how their installs went.
Check documentation for initial setup, config, 3rd party installation
consulting services and backup/recovery procedures.
•Usage – Research experiences with day-day operations. Check
documentation availability for ongoing configuration, security
patches, upgrade path, time line of until when support/development
will continue for the particular product.
•Support – How do you get support and assistance? Forums, paid
subscription, 3rd party commercial support ?

Architecture
•Modularity – Is the architectural technical design modular and easily
extend able? What examples/references are there for extensions and
customizations?
•Standardized – Does the solution use standard protocols that inter-
operate with other solutions and all users systems ? Are the standards
used public and have multiple participants or a standards body ?
•Development – Is there a strong development community that is
responsive to the users ? Is there an established process for
development, q/a and release ?

> > in the areas of stability, usability, and functionality (in that order).  - Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

[Floh]

Congrats for releasing Beta 0.81. :)

I'm installing new server for our developer team. There is a line:
"In addition to the above, the locale of the server must be en_US.UTF-8. Furthermore, the contents of /etc/default/locale must contain the single line LANG="en_US.UTF-8". You can verify this as below."

Just being curious. Must it be en_US.UTF-8? If so, what is the reason? Usually I'd use de_DE.UTF-8 here.

cu Floh

[Fred Dixon]

Hi Floh,

> Must it be en_US.UTF-8? 

Yes. You can try it with de_DE.UTF-8, but we were unsuccessful installing BigBlueButton in past when this was a value different than en_US.UTF-8.

If you try a different value an it works, let us know!

Cheers,... Fred

-- 
BigBlueButton Developer

http://bigbluebutton.org/
http://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton

BigBlueButton on twitter: @bigbluebutton

--

[toFlash Voytov]

great news Fred!

[Florian Erfurth]

Hi Fred.
yesterday I successfully installed Bbb 0.81Beta without any problems on fresh Ubuntu 10.04 installation, with German language.

So language was already set to de_DE@UTF-8. I only skipped setting language to us_EN I followed every steps described in install doc found on your homepage.

cu Floh

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[Fred Dixon]

Hi Everyone,

Thanks to everyone who has given us feedback and reported bugs on 0.81-beta.  Since its release, we've fixed the following issues

  http://goo.gl/u4zdi

If you are running BigBlueButton 0.81-beta, we recommend you update your server to the latest build using the following commands

  sudo apt-get update

  sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

  sudo bbb-conf --clean

  sudo bbb-conf --check

Keep the bug reports coming!

Regards,... Fred

-- 
BigBlueButton Developer

http://bigbluebutton.org/
http://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton

BigBlueButton on twitter: @bigbluebutton

[Calvin Walton]

On Tue, 2013-06-18 at 10:24 -0400, Fred Dixon wrote:
> Hi Floh,
>
> > Must it be en_US.UTF-8?
>
> Yes. You can try it with de_DE.UTF-8, but we were unsuccessful installing
> BigBlueButton in past when this was a value different than en_US.UTF-8.
>
> If you try a different value an it works, let us know!

I think that they key requirement is that you are using a UTF-8 locale.
Some of the ruby module installations will fail if UTF-8 is not
available. We added this instruction because people were running into
issues on a server installation of Ubuntu, which defaults to the "C"
locale, which doesn't support UTF-8.

We say to use en_US.UTF-8 because we know that it works, and for a
server system (remember that we recommend using a dedicated server for
BigBlueButton!) it normally doesn't really matter what locale is in use.

Using en_US.UTF-8 also helps when debugging server problems, because
otherwise error messages might be translated into a local language, and
although we have BigBlueButton developers in many countries, English is
the common language of the development team. Unfortunately, few of us
can read German :)

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