Hi, at the moment I evaluate Openmeetings if it fits my use cases for communications systems - which are somewhere between Tele-Teaching and holding meetings with rather non technical people.
Until now we've had some drama with NAT gateways or the unwillingness to install software at the far end or we had to rely on proprietary software. So - Openmeetings is a great piece of software - an solution to many problems: - no NAT drama - no NICE, no STUN to configure at the far end. - easy to install on our own server - no discussion about installing anything other than Skype on the other side. (OK, ipad followers excluded - I don't care, my Wetab works like a charme :-) ) Openmeetings has a lot of interesting features around conferencing the downside of which is an user interface which might be confusing to new users. So - in my humble opinion - my ideas for improving the user experiments: 1. On the login screen - why not just show the rooms available to that particular user - without distinguishing between public, group or private. I doubt, an average user would have access to more than, say 5 rooms at a time. So we wouldn't have to say: "click on group rooms, then enter ..." 2. I have different clients which I'd like to put into different rooms. Groups look great for that purpose. Why not have an option to send the user to this preferred room right after logging in? That would relief me of directing the user to enter the room by clicking here and there. OK, there is a workaround with invitations, but I'd like to give everybody his/her login. (probably the REST interface can help here) 3. Have a way to "store" the video windows somewhere while having the possibility to drag someone out to watch closely while the others stay in line. (as BigBlueButton does) 4. Overall, a bit more flexibility in the screen layout would be nice. The user list in the "conference" style consumes a lot of screen real estate - especially when watching a shared desktop. Chat is rather unusable as an incoming chat message would not display when the section is minimized. When not minimized, expensive vertical space is lost. Why not maximize when a message comes in? <dream>Integration with XMPP</dream> 5. Is there a (documented) way to configure the screen layout? It would be nice to create different layouts for different needs. (I miss e.g. a simple one2one video conference with the remote screen maximized and maybe a chat window below - no more) I wouldn't mind to dig into XML to get this. :-) 6. Have some measurement to estimate delays and bandwidth jams. I have the strange situation that somehow delays go up to 10sec - with no reasonable cause (512kbit upload - not even close to the 1024kbit available here). If this is probably something outside of our reach (as it is TCP) - is it possible to detect delayed signals and warn? This delay issue is severely affecting acceptance. (for some strange reason I've never heard anybody complaining about drop outs and delays on Skype) 7. Is there a way e.g. to subscribe the calendar to a CalDav server for synchronizing it with my egroupware calendar. (or any other supporting this) Planning conferences requires checking my appointments first - if I or the other persons, maybe, is/are available. 8. have that great mindmap feature soon. :-) OK, enough wishes for today. Christmas is over for two weeks. Hope that helps. Greetings Conrad PS: Dreaming of a WebRTC version some day. :-)
