Upcoming apps
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The main issue with Nextcloud Talk that I see is that it's part of the Nextcloud-as-a-monolith model that they push, for understandable reasons. However, a lot of organizations have serious needs around chat with deeper integrations. For example, Rocket.Chat can enable one-click video conferencing, on top of all the other myriad of features, right there where users already are communicating with each other and with services, bots, and notifications by using either BBB or Jitsi, which is great, and means we don't need to have users switch tools just for video calling. Talk lacks this kind of integration in general, which just makes it tough, and it's (imo) not quite mature and suited as the alternatives described.
Similarly, between BBB and Jitsi, there are lots of options to do more advanced things than just integrate them with another chat client, like embedding those conferences into web pages via Jitsi's API for that or BBB's Wordpress plugin / API or into an LMS like Moodle (also on the wishlist) via plugins (for BBB or Jitsi). Jitsi also has the ability to live stream in addition to record meetings (BBB can also do recording). Basically, if I'm going to spend valuable server resources (and transitively money) to run a video conferencing solution, I want more mileage/"bang for my buck" than Nextcloud meet offers.
I think Talk is a great starting point for anyone with casual interest, limited needs, or just exploring video conferencing as a tool, but once we get to the proverbial big leagues with heavier-duty use cases, it's hugely beneficial to have one of these more fully featured tools. That's also striking at one of the huge advantages of the Cloudron platform - everyone can deploy the right-sized solution for their needs with ease and spend the energy on evaluating and transitioning tools as it's necessary, rather than getting mired in the administrative overhead of operating an existing one.
As a parting thought, I'll add that today I find myself leaning more toward Jitsi than BBB after (finally) a positive experience with an event leveraging the public meet.jit.si and thinking about the live streaming capabilities...frankly, as I've sworn up and down repeatedly in this thread, either would be great. If the hardware demands are too extreme on BBB, then let's go Jitsi. The control and privacy are really the banner features, imo, and both do an excellent job on those core requirements.
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@girish please add Jira Service Desk, it would be so helpful and installs like confluence.
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@SavvyMatthew Isnt jira just an add-on to confluence?
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@murgero It's a separate product, somewhat integrated, of course, which actually comes in four (seriously?) versions now, Jira Software, Jira Align, Jira Core, and Jira Service Desk. All priced somewhat differently, with slightly different features, views, and reporting for slightly different workflows.
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@jimcavoli Correct most companies use a combination of the four. In our case we use Service desk and confluence, it would be beneficial to use the Cloudron features in conjunction with them. The Install for Jira Service Desk is just like the confluence one just a separate package. but follows a simple package.
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I would love to have Jira as well. Issue is that there is no way to automated the database configuration of those apps. And this is really annoying since it's not the experience that we want to provide our users (and causes support tickets which we don't want to handle). We have reached out to Atlassian support as well in the past and they have been unhelpful. If anyone know of any trick to automated the db setup of those apps, would love to hear it.
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@girish I'm not sure if I ever saw a complete automated Jira deployment. The company I work for has at least a straight forward docker setup with hassle free update process. As long as it is not a major version upgrade (from Jira 7 to 8...) it works pretty well.
I would not recommend to automate the process in production without QA (we do not even do that) so it remains a manual task. I can ask my company if I can share some of our code with you.Edit: Okay we also got the DB creation+migration part automated
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Just chiming in that either BBB or Jitsi would be awesome!
Although yes I think I'd learn slightly toward Jitsi as from what has been written above apparently it uses less resources, it seems more widely used, and it integrates nicely with Rocket.Chat which I'm loving.
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@jdaviescoates said in Upcoming apps:
I'd learn slightly toward Jitsi as from what has been written above apparently it uses less resources, it seems more widely used, and it integrates nicely with Rocket.Chat which I'm loving.
Saying that, the first time I used the demo BBB years ago I was blown away but the automatic translation in their chat. I was chatting away to people who were reading and writing in a different language and it was a while before any of us noticed as it was just auto-translating everything into our preferred language!
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Hi everyone,
in the past weeks I have been working with the Cloudron team to make Kopano Meet available as an app for Cloudron.
Meet is a modern video conferencing app that is designed as a so called Progressive Web App (PWA) which means that you can add it as an app to your phone/tablet/desktop directly from within Meet and without relying on external app stores. Functionality wise Meet provides 1 to 1 and group video calls as well as screensharing. We are utilising a library called "Glue" which facilitates easy integration into other applications, internal proof of concepts with this have already been done with Matrix and ownClouds new Phoenix UI (based on customer projects).
The app has been released to unstable last week and can be found at https://cloudron.io/store/com.kopano.meet.cloudronapp.html.
Looking forward to your feedback!
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@fbartels could you please explain exactly what a "direct connection" means here:
"In the default configuration there is no TURN server configured, so Kopano Meet will only work between users within networks where direct connections are allowed." ?
i.e. would two users of the same Cloudron but in different physical locations on different networks be able to have a call without a TURN server? Or would that require a TURN server too?
Thanks!
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@thetomester13 TURN is lingo in the networking world. There is even a wikipedia entry for it.
Yes, Meet is entirely self-hosted. even moreso than Jitsi since it does not depend on apps from the Apple and Google app stores to work in mobile devices. But since its not easy to reliable run a turn service (at best two ip addresses, should be reachable on port 443 to not be blocked on public wifi, ..) we are offering it as a service for our customers.
@jdaviescoates said in Upcoming apps:
would two users of the same Cloudron but in different physical locations on different networks be able to have a call without a TURN server?
There is no straight answer to that as it also depends on firewall configuration. In general Meet uses WebRTC to connect the individual users. At best both users can discover each other directly and no external component is required, if that is not the case stun/turn is used to discover each other, do some udp hole punching or in the worst case relay complete traffic (this would then fall on the shoulders of the turn server).
Blog about STUN/TURN https://blog.ivrpowers.com/post/technologies/what-is-stun-turn-server/ (not my blog)
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Been playing with Kopano Meet on a restricted basis on one of my Cloudron instances. Honestly, it's a good, simple solution for certain purposes, but it seems to lack a lot of the features of a full-on BBB/Jitsi installation, for which reason I would still prefer either of those to be available. Perhaps there's room for both to exist on the platform (I think so! They service different niches well), but for my particular desires/plans, the feature set just isn't quite there.
Hit me up if you have any questions.
