So I’ve been spending a bit of time in the foreign and somewhat obscure world of Openmeetings.  For those of you who don’t know, Openmeetings is a free video conferencing suite that anyone can download and install on their server for free.  It runs entirely on flash (a little odd) but it’s astonishing how well it works.  I’m a bit of a programming hack and I got it running, though it does require a little bit of assembly (the action not the language).

Apparently it’s the project of a fellow in Germany and there’s been a company set up around it to provide tech support around the product (a-la most open-source business models).  Unfortunately, the documentation on this platform is a little vague (though it’s getting better) and there seems to be an existent, though a bit of a limited community surrounding it.  The existing documentation also has a stamp of “English is my second language but I’m doing my best.”  (Hey, it’s much better than if I were to try to write up documentation in German so no judgement here.)   I’ve decided to document some of what I’ve found about openmeetings, as I’ve benefited from so much open documentation in other areas already.  I don’t really fancy myself much of a blogger (if you couldn’t tell by looking at my wordpress site already) but I figure this is worth providing a bit of info on.

I’d highly recommend this software to anyone who (for whatever reason) is looking for a way to host online conferences themselves.   It’s got lots of great features that (in my opinion) are more conducive to working Google Hangouts or Skype.  Read more about more about what it’s got at http://openmeetings.apache.org/