Today we would like to show you the first alpha release of the new Kopano Web Meetings. Kopano Web Meetings was redesigned from scratch and now consists of a small server-side daemon and an accompanying plugin for Mattermost. The first alpha allows one-to-one video calls and will be extended over the coming months.
One of the recurring feature requests for our current Web Meetings software was the introduction of persistent chats. This, along with the overall growing trend of ChatOps, led us to the evaluation of Mattermost in the beginning of the last year. As a result of this evaluation, we started publishing installation packages for Mattermost in September last year. Shortly afterwards we published a matching app for the Univention App Center
When we started looking into Mattermost, it already had “video call” functionality, which seemed to have been stuck in a beta stadium for quite a while and was also nowhere near as usable as our current stack. While getting familiar with the Mattermost code base, we first attempted to use the current functionality, while replacing the existing backend code with our own implementation. With the release of Mattermost 4.5.0 the Mattermost developers opened up their software to allow “third-party plugins” to be uploaded and configured by the local administrator. This alpha version makes use of this new plugin architecture to provide a seamless integration of Kopano Web Meetings into Mattermost.
Requirements:
- Mattermost 4.6.0
- Modern browser supporting WebRTC (such as Google Chrome, Iridium or Firefox)
Test it out yourself!
Kopano WebMeetings does currently consist of two components. One component is the Kopano Web Meetings server (kwmserver), which acts as a signalling/channelling server and the Kopano Web Meeting Plugin for Mattermost, which implements the GUI and WebRTC functionality for the user.
Interested users can either check out the source code from the links provided above or download pre-compiled versions from our download server. In addition to this we are also providing a Docker image for kwmserver. Proper distribution packages (deb and rpm) will be added in a later stage.
Please have a look the Kopano Mattermost Manual for setup instructions.
Next steps and roadmap
With this first alpha release now out to the public we want to follow up with small and frequent increments until reaching a version 1.0 and replacing the current Kopano WebMeetings in Kopano WebApp. Next feature we want to look into are call with multiple users and UX improvements (user settings, etc).
Download and feedback
Both kwmserver and the Mattermost plugin can be downloaded from our community download site. The Docker image can be fetched from kopano/kwmserverd. Please check the Readme for kwmserver for instructions how to run the Docker container.
We are looking forward to your feedback on this version, let us know what you think by sending an email to , or posting over at the Kopano Forum.
