My hope as well, that we can have some rough consensus on this here, and we can approve it formally at week’s meeting and start offering the service as soon as multi-Greenlight is ready.
The max duration was on the original table. To be honest I don’t feel it’s so important, or that the numbers here are consequential. Zoom has limit just short of an hour for free tier, most meetings last an hour, that pushes ppl to upgrade. In our case, if 3h meeting isn’t long enough for you and you need 6h, you should probably spend less time in meetings
Also, even if things are here, doesn’t mean we have to actively police it. At least not a block to launch. Think of server bandwidth and how many providers are actually “unmetered” essentially but don’t advertise that.
With our Greenlight fork it is possible to set the maximum duration of every meeting for a Greenlight instance, although we haven’t tested this a lot.
Personally I would add a duration limit only to the free tier. Also note that Greenlight by default only allows the room limit per User to be set to 1, 5, 10 or unlimited, anything deviating from that would mean additional development work.
Thanks @hng! In fact, I did even integrate those changes from your fork myself and forgot about it So, we have a configuration knob to control duration, see this commit. Comments on this functionality above are important to reflect on though.
Honestly, I think we should just merge the Small and Medium tiers and offer 5 rooms/20 participants/24h calls, to also simplified this whole table.
The meeting duration can prevent use cases where people literally keep a video on 24h. My old company used to continuously stream rooms between different offices.
Proposal v2
Free
Small
Large
Organization
Custom
User accounts
1
1
1
Unlimited
Unlimited
Max rooms per account
1
5
10
10
Unlimited
Max meeting participants
5
20
50
250
Unlimited
Max meeting duration
1h
24h
24h
24h
Unlimited
Event server access*
✓
✓
✓
✓
Recording
✓
✓
✓
Customization
✓
✓
Probably can allow Large and Organizations to have recorded rooms now too. See Zoom offerings for comparisons (they cap at 24h for first paid tier).
One question concerning the max meeting participants: Is this number per meeting/room or overall? BBB does not support meetings with more than 100 users. Also does that mean an Organization gets a dedicated server? 250 participants is quite large and would need a dedicated server in my opinion, most BBB servers can handle 200-300 users at the same time (but not in the same room).
Reading this table, I would assume it means per room. I don’t think there is a way to limit # of participants per Greenlight instance since BBB doesn’t actually know.
This will prevent a lot of our events. Even if cameras are mostly off? Is this part of the spec or general ballpark?
I also agree. 250 is from the original table, it didn’t make much sense to me to be colocated on same BBB. Maybe @chris can comment on the origin of that? That tier does not have a dedi.
We have always said to our customers that this recommendation exist and we can not support sessions with more than 100 participants, if they may work they may work.
In general it is very hard to get concrete numbers as there are so many factors. BBB also has no real limits, performance just goes done or the server even crashes if usage exceeds the server resources.
Performance wise it’s like this: only listening < audio enabled < webcam enabled.
Seems to me, to run a service like this, without means of monitoring usage, is daft. It means dimensions of service bundles and account pricing can’t be based on any operational information. This can’t make sense?
Maybe our use case - as a service-reselling organisation - is different from the original use case of BBB (provision of rooms under the administration of a single educational organisation?). But a business reselling server capacity needs to be able to monitor usage? Basic! Resources need to be found, to scope out the work required to patch this?
Could be that BBB API needs hacking? So, deep-ish work.
This is realistic imo. My view of the most important use case is to support collaboartive work in teams (‘circles’ even!) with persistent shared workspace and persistent shared documents.
I don’t see ad hoc meetings, each starting from scratch, with presenters bringing their own package of materials in their briefcase, as basically the most significant use case.
These are zoom rooms and we are about one year and perhaps $200k away from technically and operationally able to support that as a service. Ballparking.
To clarify . . does Organization = container x3, ie the resellers’ service bundle? In which case, name it “Resale”?
From the table, Organization looks kinda like “Supersize” - a Large org with very large meetings. Is this really a use case? Isn’t this beginning to be “Event”?
Could pricing be added to the table @benhylau - interpolated from the original, even if rough. This will be a helpful start point for tomorrow’s discussion. Broadly, I like the divisions.
No, it’s a single container where you are prohibited from resale according to:
The main thing Organization allows is for admins to have their own single Greenlight container and register as many accounts as they like for their own org members. This is not same as reselling.
Events will be very similar to Organization currently, but over time it will be backed by more BBB server resources.
Glad this is on the roadmap. Room-open for 24hr is a good initial step. Let’s not call 'em zoom rooms though . Branding! “Circle rooms” may fit the culture we mean to enable?
It’s not necessarily on the roadmap yet, I am just mentioning that as a concept in zoom and thinking about their infra to enable that, the software and infra that we don’t have, and the labour behind making that as a service. Roughly $200k for MVP.
1 BigBlueButton recommends that no single session exceed 100 users 2 Event server is available to Members for a time duration for a fee and has specs matching an Organization tier at the moment with unlimited rooms, but we aim to move that to a dedicated server cluster eventually 3 Prices are exclusive of applicable sales tax
This is from a long chat discussion with @hng@mikemh and the limits now reflect the realities of the tech we have and pricing compatible with collocall.de and comparisons with zoom.us.
Personally and just checking it briefly this looks good to me.
Just a note: For now we at collocall also limit the Organization account to 50 participants. But in general I have the feeling that most customers have a higher number of possible participants in mind than they actually need/use, so these numbers may just be numbers
So, we have a configuration knob to control duration, see 
. Branding! “Circle rooms” may fit the culture we mean to enable?