Dear members,
We will be in contact in the next few weeks, asking you to set your password on the new meet.coop servers. You do not need to do anything just yet, and this is an expected part of the ongoing upgrades to our services.
We will be switching over to a new Single Sign-On identity provider soon. This is the system that allows you to log in to meet.coop services with a single account.
The new provider will ensure that we can more easily keep our systems secure and updated in years to come.
Why will passwords need to change?
We are migrating from an existing Keycloak identity server to a new Keycloak identity server hosted by Web Architects and Autonomic.
Passwords on the old identity server are stored with industry-standard encryption, which means it isn’t easy for us to copy credentials over to the new identity server without a painstaking database migration.
We have instead opted to require a password reset for our members. This simplifies the migration path behind the scenes, and although regular password changes are no longer recommended, some meet.coop accounts were created many years ago, and changing passwords after all this time seems appropriate.
Are there more changes coming?
As you may have noticed, we have spun down ca.meet.coop and deployed a new BigBlueButton instance for de.meet.coop. This new BigBlueButton instance is now on the 3.x release, which brings many new improvements and changes.
Please note these changes are part of the upstream BigBlueButton/Greenlight software project. If there is any feature you are missing, or there are changes that you are struggling with, please let us know on our forum.
After this identity server migration, we will be in a sustainable position to provide meet.coop services into the future. There has been some discussion of adding new apps to the meet.coop inventory, such as LaSuite Docs, a minimalist Google Docs alternative with development funded by the French, Dutch, and German governments and Nextcloud. Keep an eye on our forum for more discussion of future additions.
Note that we will also be adding single-sign-on to our Jitsi server. Jitsi meetings will only be able to be created by a meet.coop member.
We offer our deep thanks for your continued support during these challenging times.
Solidarity,
@kawaiipunk and @spacehobo on behalf of The Online Meeting Co-operative committee.