Upcoming apps
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Great news, a videoconference app was missing for quite some time now. I was trying to pack jitsi meet, but there were too many obstacles (wasn't working with the slim image for starters) so I gave up eventually. Never heard of BBB, but looks nice, especially the recording feature. Jitsi would be neat because of the remote desktop feature, but I guess we can't have it all
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@girish said in Upcoming apps:
BigBlueButton or Jitsi (we will evaluate which works well for conferencing. We have used both and they both work well but BBB might win). If you have any thoughts here, please leave a comment.
I would throw in another contender: https://meet-app.io
This is currently a few binaries/containers, but if there is interest we could compile it into a single executable which would make it easy to deploy it in a cloudron app container.
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I would recommend to post suggestions for new apps at the app-wishlist. This thread is just to announce what comes next.
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Good to hear about these coming apps! I'm especially interested in Jitsi, since its inclusion means it can be integrated as a self-hosted version in a Matrix/Riot environment (Riot group calls is based on Jitsi).
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It would be absolutely great and a unique selling point if you could integrate (optionally for those who don't want it) PiHole into OpenVPN. It would be a most safe and convenient solution.
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This is a really a mouthwatering list of apps.
Only suggestion I have for consideration would be improving how apps are organized on dashboard. (See: https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/1842/curious-how-other-cloudron-users-organize-their-apps)
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The OpenVPN app is now fixed up. You can add custom settings by editing
/app/data/openvpn.conf. Docs are at https://cloudron.io/documentation/apps/openvpn/#customizations. We didn't build an admin UI as such but maybe we will put in the effort some other time. -
Rocketchat group calls are also using Jitsi, so including that would be a big plus for us.
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Rocket.Chat can also integrate with BBB - frankly, I could care less which it is as long as it works better than the freebie jit.si we're trying to use now. I get terrible feedback on that, and hopefully bringing that "in-house" allows for a better experience. That said, I might actually have developed a slight preference toward BBB just because it has more integration points for various LMS as well, both WP plugins that would be useful now and freestanding apps which could be useful in the future.
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Will BBB be included in the next update?:) or Jitsi, I'm ok with both:)
cant wait!
thx
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So far, we have finished OnlyOffice, OpenVPN and the development apps (with 3.4). Bitwarden and Jitsi/BBB remain. BBB seems to take a LOT of resources, so I am not sure this is a good bit for our users for the moment despite it possibly having a better UI. That said, we use Jitsi everyday and it works great.
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You know, beggars and choosers, but as I said before, I lean somewhat harder toward BBB as time has gone on, in part for its slightly better-supported integration points, especially for LMS apps. This aside, my practical concerns is being able to self-host conferencing, with privacy (not world-usable to start/create conferences), and have the phone bridge to the system work. I realize it's a lot of work to get these things specifically working, so I'm necessarily fine with either, but I'm curious what the differences in resources required between the two options is. Anyone looking to self-host conferencing to any serious degree should expect to allocate a fair amount of power to such a task, but of course I understand there's tradeoffs.
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@jimcavoli I am just speaking by reading the docs which might be outdated. https://docs.bigbluebutton.org/2.2/install.html#minimum-server-requirements says:
- 4 GB of memory with swap enabled (8 GB of memory is better)
- 4 CPU cores (8 is better)
- TCP ports 80 and 443 are accessible
* UDP ports 16384 - 32768 are accessible
* Port 80 is not in use by another application
Memory requirements aside, those port requirements are quite extreme. Though maybe they are just trying to say "keep a domain available" to host it, not sure.
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I agree BBB has better UI, I'd prefer Jitsi since it's simple, but the default install is a world video conference server, you need to setup secure domain to have user id and password, hopefully if jitsi is the one, plz make it private:), I suppose no one wants to have the default jitsi server open to the world ^^
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@girish damn thats a hell load of ports.
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@girish Don't know if this is helpful or not, but doesn't Nextcloud have at least a few features similar to BBB?
Edit, yeah it has an official app you can install called Talk:
Looks like it supports audio, video, and screensharing! At the very least, the basics. Might need extra stuff though so i am not sure how viable this option is.
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https://urgero.org
~ Professional Nerd. Freelance Programmer. ~ -
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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https://urgero.org
~ Professional Nerd. Freelance Programmer. ~ -
@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 You could (maybe) setup the app - then take a copy of the database untouched, modify it with the variables as needed for the app during first time installs??
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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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@subven That's awesome, I will send you an email to follow up.
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@girish I've send you an mail regarding this topic. Hope it gets through because of the "suspicious" attachements.
Hit me up if you have any questions. -
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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I would give another +1 to jitsi due to the remote desktop feature (available in the electron app, to get rid of teamviewer)
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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 amazing news, thanks!
Really looking forward to trying this out!
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@fbartels this looks great! I'd like to give it a try, but I'm not sure what the 'first time' message is talking about - what's a TURN server, and if I don't have it configured, is it really entirely self hosted?
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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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@fbartels Thanks for the breakdown, I'll give it a whirl!
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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.
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What’s the status on Jitsi currently? For my usecases I find it powerful to use the apps that do one or a tightly scoped things well rather than installing suite type apps.
So with Riot out the gates and the Matrix app soon to follow, the logical next step for me in that setup is to bring a Jitsi app in under the same roof (Riot+Matrix uses Jitsi under the hood).
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@yusf But doesn't Matrix have it's own video calling features?
--
https://urgero.org
~ Professional Nerd. Freelance Programmer. ~ -
@murgero For 1on1 calls yes, for group calls no.
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@fbartels said in Upcoming apps:
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.
I've not looked at this yet but just found this tutorial about how to set up a turn server to work with nextcloud talk
https://help.nextcloud.com/t/howto-setup-nextcloud-talk-with-turn-server/30794 -
I am waiting for Matrix server
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Any news on bitwarden?
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@Trankery You can follow along for the latest on that app via its thread in the App Wishlist - https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/1082/bitwarden-self-hosted-password-manager
