BBB desktop client (Windows)

[Michael]

Good day!

I represent some IT company (details in a PM) and we use BBB  about a year in production. It is our video conferencing service, used for internal communication, client support and demonstrations. We have an ideas to improve our service, but we can`t spare our own developers for it. But we can pay donations to or direct payment for the work (we can discuss it separately).

The our idea is to make the service more user-friendly for ordinary users. Someone can ask, what can be more friendly then a web solution? Well, desktop client can. When you have hundreds of users and dozens of rooms, it too hard to (support) tell everyone to use a supported browsers, check everyone open ports, etc. So, here comes a desktop client with self-check, and simple configuration. Thats it.

1) The main idea is to make this open-source, so anyone fell free to fork it or improve some way.
2) I guess that re-write bbb to a native application is a dozens of work.. so it could be wrapped web app from the web-server to windows application. Example: a few weeks ago, Microsoft (omg) did it to the new version of Skype in Linux. They use Electron platform that is based Chromium and Node.js... or something like that.
3) Application needs to run a self-check at the start, and check all open ports (especially for WebRTC), connection speed and alert when problems detected.. switch from WebRTC to Flash mode, or just to "Chat-mode" when client speed is too low, and notify about it to the client. Tray icons, notifications and other pretty staff is appreciated.
4) Application needs to use all basic bbb functions (except desktop sharing... its important, but not in our desktop solution).
5) Application needs to authorize with our front server (wordpress CMS, with bbb plugin https://ru.wordpress.org/plugins/bigbluebutton/ ), users and rooms. Users appears in Wordpress database from Microsoft Active Directory (via other plugin), but some users to clients is created directly in Wordpress.

So.. how about that idea? Is it real? Is someone from local developers can take it? Is it interesting? We can discuss more details via PM, i can tell my corporate address, etc. Thank you for your attention!

[Fred Dixon]

Hi Michael,

> I represent some IT company (details in a PM) and we use BBB  about a year in production. 

Cool!  We (the core developers) have been working on BigBlueButton for over eight years.  It's awesome to see its adoption steadily increase as we release new versions.

> We have an ideas to improve our service, but we can`t spare our own developers for it. But we can pay donations to or direct payment for the work (we can discuss it separately).

There is no place you can send donations to support development of BigBlueButton (we think it's a poor business model for an open source project).  See

   http://docs.bigbluebutton.org/support/faq.html#how-can-i-donate-money-to-the-project

The above FAQ gives suggestions on how you can contact companies familiar with the project.

Your ideas are valid.  There are two broad approaches.

1.  Update the BigBlueButton Flash client to run as an Adobe Air application, and thus it could be installable on the desktop.

2.  Build upon the HTML5 client (currently under development) to create an installable application using Electron (or other such components).

Neither of the above solutions provides a simple re-compile (otherwise we would have already done it :-).  

With Flash, you get built-in support for audio/video, but not access to WebRTC (which is only within the browser).  With HTML5, you get WebRTC, but we currently use Java for desktop sharing (we are exploring using WebRTC for desktop sharing).  For an overview of our plans, see

   https://groups.google.com/d/msg/bigbluebutton-dev/2OLdUbi2K_w/1pzOZoppAwAJ

For the moment, we're already pretty focused on BigBlueButton 1.1.  But others may be interested in what your proposing.  What you describe is possible given enough development effort.

Regards,... Fred

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[Михаил Михайлович]

Thank you very much for your detailed response! This greatly explains the situation.

I hope that we will find someone else who is interested in this idea and want to implement it. If someone does, then please contact me.

~M


четверг, 28 июля 2016 г., 16:35:42 UTC+3 пользователь Fred Dixon написал: