BigBlueButton implements the core web conferencing features you would expect in a commercial system, but under an open source license. These core feature include audio/video sharing, presentations with extended whiteboard capabilities - such as a pointer, zooming and drawing - public and private chat, breakout rooms, screen sharing, integrated VoIP using FreeSWITCH, and support for presentation of PDF documents and Microsoft Office documents. BigBlueButton is a pure HTML5 client. It uses the browser's support for web real-time communications WebRTC to send/receive audio, video, and screen.
Types of users
In a BigBlueButton session there are two types of users: viewer or moderator. As a viewer, a user may join the voice conference, share their webcam, raise their hand, and chat with others. As a moderator, a user may mute/unmute others, eject any user from the session, and make any user the current presenter. The presenter may upload slides and control the presentation. The BigBlueButton server runs on Ubuntu 16.04 64-bit and can be installed either from packages or install script.
Architecture
As a pure single web page application, BigBlueButton front-end uses React and the backend uses MongoDB and Node.js. It also uses Redis, the open-source key-value data store software, to maintain an internal list of its meetings, attendees, and any other relevant information.
History
In 2007 the project was started at Carleton University by the Technology Innovation Management program. The first version was written by Richard Alam under the supervision of Tony Bailetti. In 2009 Richard Alam, Denis Zgonjanin, and Fred Dixon uploaded the BigBlueButton source code to Google Code and formed Blindside Networks, a company pursuing the traditional open source business model of providing paid support and services to the BigBlueButton community. In 2010 the core developers added a whiteboard for annotating the uploaded presentation. Jeremy Thomerson added an application programming interface which the BigBlueButton community subsequently used to integrate with Sakai, WordPress, Moodle 1.9, Moodle 2.0, Joomla, Redmine, Drupal, Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware, Foswiki, and LAMS. Google accepted BigBlueButton into the 2010 Google Summer of Code program. To encourage contributions from others, the core developers moved the source code from Google Code to GitHub. The project indicated its intent to create an independent not-for-profit BigBlueButton Foundation to oversee future development. In 2011 the core developers announced they were adding record and playback capabilities to BigBlueButton 0.80. In 2020 the project released BigBlueButton 2.2, a full rewrite of the client and server to support HTML5. The BigBlueButton name comes from the initial concept that starting a web conference should be as simple as pressing a metaphorical big blue button.
Related publications
Open Source Collaboration Software for Multipoint Video, Audio, and Text
