There’s one official BBB app in the NC app store: https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/bbb This one looks promising., but there’s also another team that has been working on some NC app: https://github.com/ramezrafla/spreed-bigbluebutton#nextcloud-talk-using-big-blue-button
Maybe we should try both, but start with the official one? I just added it to the cloud.meet.coop server but it requires command line access in order to configure it. Here’s the details: https://github.com/sualko/cloud_bbb/
At some point in the next few days, when I have got on top of the backlog of work that has built up, I’ll setup a development server with two Nextclouds (one for each of the BBB plugins) and WordPress and Drupal sites for testing those plugins, perhaps Moodle also — I agree that we need to have a play with the open source BigBlueButton plugins to see how developed they are and what options might be available in order that we can work out what possibilities we have.
FYI there seems to be further integration implementations coming into Greenlight that Nextcloud has decent integrations for: https://github.com/bigbluebutton/greenlight/pull/1334 (SAML) and https://github.com/bigbluebutton/greenlight/pull/1194 (OpenID) are tracking those.
Without delving deeply into this, I have an impression the BBB api isn’t hugely rich. So perhaps we can only have limited expectations of what these other front ends might deliver.
However, I’m very keen to know how things look from the NextCloud side. It would make a lot of difference to have a room as an auxiliary to a collaboration that was already ongoing, on an infrastructure of NextCloud tools - especially shared PDFs in the cloud, which might then be taken into BBB rooms for discussion.
I haven’t systematically experimented with screen sharing in BBB. A quick trial before the Open2020 event displayed way too much lag (thus, out-of-sync behaviour between video image and audio commentary) to be able to attempt anything involving live manipulation with voice-over.
Does anyone have more experience of how laggy BBB is?
We have integrated the BBB server with our NextCloud; I simply activated the BBB plugin and @hng put the secret API key of our BBB server.
Now all of us who have a user at our NextCloud instance can go to their Personal Settings page and choose BigBlueButton (direct link) . This will allow you to create a room with some config options. The UI is more limited than the GreenLight interface. The only advantage that occurs to me is this one: you can set the access level to “Internal” which limits access to NextCloud users. In case that is a useful group, this can be useful. That said, the GL UI is richer and preferrable in most contexts I’d think.
Hello, the housing co-op I’m a member of just started subscribing to Meet.coop via Open Collective.
Could we also receive API URL + key so we can access Meet.coop via our Nextcloud instance?
Hi @neck, great to see you here!
WRT connecting to the API of a BBB server, the “API secret” that needs to be shared exposes information of the users on that server. That’s why we cannot share the API secret for a shared BBB server. Only a few members of the tech.circle have access to that secret or obvious privacy concerns.
Only in case of a dedicated BBB server can we arrange such setup. Or maybe in the future when we BBB API interface would have more granular access control forms.
Let me add that the BBB plugin for nextcloud is not a great user experience that would add very much value. So far we installed it only in our meet.coop operations member NextCloud, for testing purpose but without using the plugin. If that’s any relief :-XD
Thank you @wouter this clarifies everything, perhaps in the future can go ahead with a dedicated server (and Nextcloud’s app makes progres), will see! For now the shared server does the job!