LCCS Alternatives

[Adobe_ejs]

Hi all,

You may have seen an email message earlier today from me describing our plans to shutdown the LCCS service on December 31st.    I would like to use this thread for the community to discuss alternatives.   There isn't a one-size fits all solution so I think it's useful to talk about a couple of different options.  You may discover others on your own so please post them here.  To get the discussion started, here's some things I've looked at.

• Open Source.  We have looked at this as an option and it's simply not viable for a number of reasons.   There are dependancies on third party and Adobe code that are extremely difficult to separate out.   Some of this code runs other services at Adobe that will continue to operate.
• Flash Media Server.  LCCS is an application built on top of FMS.   I've spoken with some customers that are planning to build the LCCS features they need on top of an FMS server.   Having spoken with the FMS product manager, I can say that FMS continues to have a roadmap and will be getting investment.   We will continue to sell it into the future.   I realize this option may not be viable for some because of the associated expense around licensing and hosting your own FMS server - which brings us to FMS hosting
• FMS hosting services:  http://www.influxis.com/ does FMS hosting.  There may be others that provide this service as well.   Please post others if you know of any. 

Also if you need further information from Adobe, I''ll do my best to dig it up.

Thanks,

Jeff

[Adobe_ejs]

Hi

Thank you all for your candid feedback.  I hear you and Adobe hears you and we are taking a look at some other possible options to ease your transition from LCCS. This research will take some time but we will work as quickly as possible.  I will post additional information as soon as it is available. Thanks for your continued patience.  If you want to have a 1 on 1 conversation with me you can reach me at stanier@adobe.com.  I would be happy to setup a time to discuss with you.

Jeff

[BARRYC16]

Thanks Jeff,

The fact that you are looking at possible options is great news. This is wholeheartedly appreciated.

One additional aspect I'd like to add to the conversation is that if Adobe has costs/losses associated with keeping the service up and running, the developement community should be polled about our willingness to pay more for the service. I'm sure there are people in the same position as myself who had planned for much greater use of the service once our products have gone into production. There may be other cost structures, including a simple rate increase, that would enable Adobe to keep it running for an extension of the currently planned shutdown schedule without that cost burden.

I'm not sure how relevant this suggestion is, but my point is that if bottom line cost is an issue, we should explore solutions.

Barry

[Adobe_ejs]

Barry,

Thanks for this.   I may want to pick your brain later in the week.

Can you send me your email address.  I'm stanier@adobe.com

jeff

[adam_k]

thank you jeff for some encouraging news.  it's good to know that some discussion is still possible here. 

[amma-adobe]

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for starting this thread.

Are you saying that LCCS is built on top of FMS "ALONE" ?

Or is it that FMS is one of the peices in the puzzle?

For supporting large number of user, one node solution will be a no no for us.

We definitely need to have some clustered solution.

My first impression was that there is LCDS/BlazeDS also somewhere in the puzzle and you

use that to cluster your servers.

Anyway, I would like to know how we can do the clustering, load balancing and failovers?

Regards

[BARRYC16]

In response to amma-adobe,

FMS is just one component of LCCS, but FMS does not do it's own load balancing and fail over.

Some of the components required for LCCS fail-over are technologies that require a license. This is another complication as far as open sourcing is concerned I would think.

Barry

[amma-adobe]

Hi Barry,

Thanks for your response.

Are you saying that Adobe has licensed that technology from someone else?

I am wondering what that technology stack is, that is used to do LCCS

failover?

We could also possibly buy the license then, given that Adobe is not going

to support it any longer.

Is LCDS/BlazeDS part of LCCS or not?

Regards

[BARRYC16]

I can't say what Adobe uses for cluster management and failover of FMS servers, but I don't think this forum is the place to coordinate an effort to rebuild this or other components of the LCCS platform. I don't believe components of LCCS can be plugged in piecemeal. It's a complex platform with some components that could be open sourced easily but other components that are either proprietary to Adobe(screen sharing), tied into internal Adobe systems(payments) or licensed from 3rd parties. Any effort to replace LCCS in it's entirety would require a lot of coordination, cooperation from Adobe engineers and time. The members of the LCCS team are the only people who are in a position to put some kind of an estimate on the full scale of this.

[Former Community Member]

Thanks for the reassuring news Jeff!  When you say "ease the transition from LCCS", you mean transition from the brand and not the functionality, right?

And I would have no problem paying more for the service bandwidth as well!

Matt

[Adobe_ejs]

Matt,

When I say transition I mean that LCCS won't continue in it's current form as an Adobe hosted services.  I'll do my best to preserve as much functionality as possible.    The discussions in this forum are helping me understand what's valuable to you.

Thanks,

Jeff

[Gustavo_Scanfer]

Hi Jeff,

Thank you for your efforts. I'm adding one more vote to keep the screen sharing functionality.

Maybe just add a parameter where users can specify / point to their own FMS server... Wouldn't even need to open source the component or anything like that. Only make the server side code available, if any.

It would be even better if the screen share dialog was completely generic or customizable.

Thanks again,

Gustavo

[mattcom]

I have been developing for a while on a new project with LCCS.  Having heard on the potential demise of it, I have a few pointers for potential alternatives.

If you just need shared data (not video, not screen sharing),  I really like union server: http://www.unionplatform.com/

If you want free, open source (I haven't found much on the flex side, but a lot on the server side) : http://www.bigbluebutton.org/    <- This has some awesome possibilities for a good LCCS migration.  I think if we all pitch in, we could probably convert it straight across with the Flex LCCS libraries we have.  Red5 does not do RTMFP, however.

Last but not least is Wowza & FMS.  An excellent comparison chart can be found here: http://askmeflash.com/article/10/comparison-wowza-vs-fms-vs-red5

[mattcom]

Jeff,

Is there any way you think you can talk Adobe into allowing us to use the LCCS libraries on the flex side?  So we can ignore:

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* Copyright [2007-2010] Adobe Systems Incorporated

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* NOTICE:  All information contained herein is, and remains

* the property of Adobe Systems Incorporated and its suppliers,

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* Dissemination of this information or reproduction of this material

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* from Adobe Systems Incorporated.

*/

This will allow us to create some migrations easier.

Thanks!

[Former Community Member]

The only reason my company decided to invest in LCCS was the ability to do remote viewing and controling.  Does anyone know of an alternative that allows for this?

[Former Community Member]

Thanks mattcom.

I was looking at BigBlueButton too!  It does seem like a workable alternative.  Do they allow for room provisioning and external authentication?

The problem with every alternative I've looked at is that they all lack some feature(s) that LCCS has and which are absolutely needed for my site.

Matt

[mattcom]

BBB does not do room provisioning, nor does it do authentication.

External authentication is easy enough.  You can build one against your own server in less than 100 lines of code, or use other authentication services like OAuth against a number of sites like facebook, google, yahoo etc.

So, for those interested, I have decided to create server-side code that will be cross-platform for LCCS to resolve to Red5, FMS, or Wowza.  It will ulitimately require some tweaking of the Flex side libraries, but it should be able to keep most of our existing LCCS projects intact. 

A few caveats though:

     1.) I will be doing this so that you can purchase your own server license & hardware & internet services, I will not be creating an Adobe server cloud.  I am definately a novice when it comes to hardware.

     2.) I will try my very best to have the first set of code ready by August on demo servers. 

     3.) It's going to take a lot of work, so anyone interested in helping either financially or through coding please contact me. mattcommark [ at ] yahoo.com

[Mario_Rodrigues]

This sounds great @mattcom.  I would be very interested.  I've been looking at Wowza - if we can simply replace the RTC components to interact with Wowza, that would save most of the time for developers. We could simply change the room URLs to point to another service and at least for whiteboarding, video, audio and chat, that could work.  Screen sharing is another beast.

[scharles415]

Which particular features? I successfully migrated 3 clients to BigBlueButton and I am very happy with it. Send me private message, I may be able to help.

[Former Community Member]

The feature I am most interested in for my company is Remote Control and viewing.  Is that included in the new service?

[Former Community Member]

HI philswe,

Our goal is to as seemlessly as possible to transitional all the features offer with LCCS to ICS. Including ScreenSharing, Remote Control, etc to our new influxis service. We working with the LCCS team to make this happen.  I hope this clears things up.

James

[adam_k]

hey james, can you confirm that recording will also be transitioned to the new service?

great to see influxis doing the takeover, i had hoped it'd be you guys.