Big Blue Button Web Conferencing

A few days ago, I mentioned that I had found an awesome open source web conferencing software (ala WebEx) called Big Blue Button.  I am now looking at alternatives to BBB. 

Don't get me wrong, I really, really like Big Blue Button.  It just seems to me to be a bit more of a developers tool.  It doesn't integrate well with things that I would see a business needing, such as with calendaring systems for scheduling meetings in advance.  Granted, they do say it is intended for educational institutions and not for the corporate world.  There are some integrations already built for several Content Management Systems, but those are no good if you don't have a need for a CMS.  I even tried one of those integrations and found that it still lacked certain features that I wanted.  They do offer an API so you can perform such integrations with your existing applications, but if you're not a developer, you might just be wasting your time. 

Right now my focus is on a project called OpenMeetings.  Honestly, I don't like it as much as Big Blue Button, but it seems to fit all my needs.  I can even tell OpenMeetings to allow my Active Directory users to log in and schedule meetings instead of having to maintain a separate database of user accounts.  There are some things that bother me about OpenMeetings, though.  One of which is the lack of a "raise hand" button.  You can achieve the same result by clicking on a button that is used to request "Moderator" permissions.  It will show up on the screen as "<user> has a question".  It will have a check mark and an "X" next to it.  If the moderator clicks the check mark, then that user will be granted "Moderator" permissions for that meeting.  This can be misleading as it never says, "so and so is requesting new permissions", it just says "so and so has a question".  Little stuff like that always finds a way to irk me.

Overall, OpenMeetings does seem to put me much closer to an out-of-the-box experience than Big Blue Button.  And that's the reason I'm now putting my focus into using OpenMeetings.