Surely I (Doug) get on the nerves of our org’s I.T. guy. Surely. But he seems to grant me so much grace. I’ve been searching for an alternative to Zoom because the holes in its security really bother him. He’s been quietly advocating for “Big Blue Button (BBB).” Click read more to find out why. First, how in the world did they come up with this name? haha But secondly, why haven’t we heard of this? But apparently, BBB is a thing. We just didn’t know anything about it on OUR end. The first and best part about it, apparently, is the ability to host BBB on your own server. If you have that capability, or if you can host with a known vendor (that you trust), then you eliminate the majority of the problems with Zoom’s lack of security. It will be encrypted from the server all the way to users’ keyboards, just like Zoom. But UNLIKE Zoom, you’ll trust the people hosting – so the in-house privacy issue will go away – because you know the people running it. The only other downsides we can see would be that there are currently no dedicated Android nor iOS apps AND you can’t share your screen on mobile devices. If you can live with that, we finally could be looking at a trusted alternative. If you’re worried about the past, when BBB relied on Flash, that version is gone. You’ll no longer need Flash for the latest version. So what do you think? Can we at least try it? Please let us know your experience with BBB by clicking in the comment box after this item.
If you’re a faith-based internet vendor and you’re already capable of staging/hosting BBB for a ministry who needs a host, would you please provide your URL sometime below in comments? If you don’t mind, if you have installed BBB for a faith-based or humanitarian org already, please mention it in your post (without putting anyone at risk, of course).
If you have NO leads, you could also just contact a commercial company to host BB for you. In the comments that follow, please list any commercial companies you find, along with whatever you know about them. Even if you don’t have any personal relationship with them today, they can at least afford us the chance to try BBB in preparation, perhaps, for the day that we find someone who is one of those “trusted and known” hosts for whom we’re looking.
Writing this item was fun for us. In the process of learning more about BBB, we actually ended up talking ‘live’ with the Product Manager for Big Blue Button for the last ten years! He was so nice. As we talked, I could sense his commitment to both privacy and security. He made it clear that nothing was 100% private; nothing is 100% secure. But he also said that, using the scripts that they write, practically anyone with any technical background at all could set up their own BBB server from start to finish in about 15 minutes. BBB is focused on the educational market more than anything else (aren’t we all in the educating business? … about the Greatest News of all?), but the point is — he invites anyone to study the code. They can look for themselves because it’s all public knowledge. It’s all open source. At the end of the talk, we asked if we could pray for him. He hesitated only a moment, then said, “Sure?” But I’m not sure he really knew what to expect. As we wrapped up the prayer, asking that God would give him “fast fingers, a sharp mind, safety, courage, boldness, and determination,” we said Amen. He seemed floored, really. He said, “That was so special!” Honestly, I think we both were nearly in tears. It was a great moment… talking to this guy who had given so much of his life to a product that is intended to open doors to minds and hearts around the world.
Big Blue Button is waiting today for YOU to try. Host it with someone you know and trust. And let’s kick the tires. Please comment here about your own experience.
I noted this host: https://distancelearning.cloud/. Solutions are available for as little as $40/month for a classroom of 25 concurrent users. I don’t know them personally – but they’d be a great vendor to try out.
If you meet/know others, please comment here.
Has anyone else tried Jitsi? Is open-source and fully encrypted. You can go to: https://meet.jit.si/ to set up a free meeting.
Does Big Blue Button have breakout rooms?
We tried jitsi and for larger meetings it fell apart.
Yes, BBB does have breakout rooms that can be time boxed and the ability for random room assignments. Currently a max of 8 breakout rooms per session, but raising that limit is currently under active development. One current workaround is to send a group off to another room and then do additional breakout rooms in that session. However, BBB does not have remote mouse/keyboard control. Jitsi can be stable, but it seems like it may take more finessing than BBB.
Big Blue Button DOES have breakout rooms. They’re done very well, in fact.
We have a Jitsi server we have been happily using for a while. Jitsi and BigBlutButton are very different beasts, even though they both do video conferencing. With Jitsi, you do not have accounts, passwords, logins, etc (at least, not by default. You can shoe-horn those into the system.) Big Blue Button is geared towards a system where every user has their own login / account. And BBB has a lot more accounting, logging, and the like.
We use Jitsi because we have a lot of interns and people temporarily joining our meetings and we do not want to create accounts for each of them. We have our jitsi password-protected with “basic authentication” and an ssl certificate but that is about it to keep folks from using it to host their own meetings.
Yes, have tried it. Worked well. The only real drawback (compared to Zoom) I was able to see was that it would only save recording to some cloud storage (no possible to save to local disk).
I believe that’s true, that’s another reason for selecting a trusted provider or self-hosting. That said, recordings can be set to public or private, and can be later downloaded. There may be additional configuration to enable downloading though. Still playing with some of this!
We did indeed try Jitsi. I’m sure they’re good for smaller calls, but the test call we did with 25 participants just drowned Jitsi completely. For my part, it wasn’t dependable enough at this time.
Was the the free Jitsi (which may be overloaded), or a self-hosted version?
It was the free version. So we’re looking instead at Big Blue Button.
Hi Doug,
I have heard that Webex (by cisco) is one of the best for security. I know it is used by a bank so that says a lot. Pricing seems very reasonable as well.
We tried Webex and, at least for me personally, it seemed MUCH more convoluted.
Our I.T. guy has now informed me that, if everything goes as planned, our email host should have a production server stood up and ready to roll with Big Blue Button for everyone in our org by June 2nd. After we thoroughly test it, we’ll report back here. If all goes well, maybe he’ll be an option if others would like to try it. He’s a trusted vendor that our I.T. guy and others have known in faith-based circles for years — without a hitch. More in two weeks.
This vendor https://meet.thecall.company/ is a trusted vendor that we’ve been using for MS Exchange services. They have indeed demonstrated a VERY high uptime rate (i.e., a very LOW downtime) plus they are like-minded. I think they’re shooting for June 2nd to have rolled out Big Blue Button for us. Sometime after that, we should be able to make comment about how BBB is working on the production servers they’re standing up right now. Pretty exciting stuff. I was just on a demo call with our I.T. guy and our VP of Operations. They opened up multiple rooms, all hosted simultaneously. Of course, recording will add another dimension of load-balancing to consider. We’ll know more certainly by third week of June. I’ll come back here and comment after that.