ZcaleRight 1.0.0: ten servers run as easily as one

Most 1.0.0 releases mark a beginning. This one marks years of production work arriving as a product you can put in front of a procurement committee.

ZcaleRight has carried real BigBlueButton clusters since 2019: universities, schools, training providers and conferencing resellers across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and North America. More than 2 million conferences have been placed by it, and growing every term. One of them is written up as a case study at Biruni University. Nobody involved has been waiting for a version number.

What changed this week is not the software’s maturity. It is its availability. The last stretch of work before 1.0.0 went into opening the product up: all 69 capabilities published in the open, so an evaluator can read the entire surface before the first conversation; both APIs documented; a complete manual inside the product for every signed-in user; and a service level agreement that states response times rather than gesturing at them. 1.0.0 is the version where the product speaks for itself.

The fleet as one server

The first BigBlueButton server is straightforward. The second is where it stops being simple: something has to decide which server a class lands on, keep every later call pointed at that same machine, and keep recordings reachable from one place.

ZcaleRight is one BigBlueButton API in front of your whole fleet: dashboard, pools, tenants, one recordings library, auto-scaling. In production since 2019. Your learning platform keeps calling the API it already calls; only the address and the shared secret change. Moodle, Canvas, Schoology, the WordPress plugins, LTI 1.0 through 1.3 tools and whatever you built in-house all keep working, because there is no new protocol to adopt.

Built for operators

Every capability in it exists because running clusters for other organisations demanded it first. There are 69 of them in 12 groups, and the whole list is published in full rather than summarised, because a product this specific is easier to present in full than to summarise. These are the ones that change a Monday morning:

• Placement decided once, at create. The meeting stays on the server that started it, and every later call follows it there. An unhealthy server leaves rotation in seconds; a healthy one can be drained for maintenance without being deleted; two retries from a nervous LMS cannot open two rooms.
• One dashboard. Servers, live meetings, participants and storage on one auto-refreshing screen, with historical usage so you see the shape of a term, and application logs readable without shell access.
• Recordings in one catalogue. No shared mount required: recordings stay on the server that made them or move to central storage, playback links are rewritten so everything stays reachable from one place, and retention runs on the schedule you set. Search across hundreds of thousands of recordings returns in under a second, so finding one is a question, not a task.
• Policy set once, fleet-wide. Recording forced on or off across the fleet, your logo in every room, one welcome message, a default presentation, without touching a single LMS.
• Tenants. A separate API secret per tenant, checked on every call, with your branding and your powered-by line rather than ours.
• Capacity that follows the term. A schedule you build in the interface, or live load checked every minute, with a credit projection that warns, or refuses, before capacity is added. OVHcloud is supported today, and any other provider on request.

Six roles drawn around jobs that actually exist, from administrator down to a machine account that reaches the automation endpoints and never the interface, with every action granted per role rather than assumed. Support staff, recordings reviewers and quality assurance each get exactly their part of the work, and nothing else.

Migration is a URL and a secret

Clients keep calling the standard BigBlueButton API with the shared-secret checksum they already compute; checksums from SHA-1 to SHA-512 are accepted, so nothing on your side has to be modernised first. ZcaleRight authenticates the call, places it, proxies it, and holds the meeting and recording state.

In practice we stand it up beside what you already have, point one integration at it to prove the path end to end, then move the rest when you are satisfied. Your BigBlueButton servers are untouched throughout, so there is a way back at every step.

What 1.0.0 means

1.0.0 is the moment the product grew into what the market had already been asking of it. When the pandemic put whole institutions online in a matter of days, organisations came to us with problems nobody had planned for, and the product grew up answering them. Everything in it was earned that way.

The hardest test it has had was not one of ours. An education company launched its platform into the first lockdown and went from nothing into the top 10 education apps in its market inside 18 months. Live classes were not a feature of that product. They were the product, and ZcaleRight placed every one of them. Investors put $14 million behind a business whose core ran on this software, and at peak it was placing . Nothing in a specification prepares software for a curve like that. It either holds or it does not, and this one held.

We host and run it for you by default, so it is a service rather than one more thing on your plate. If your rules say the software has to sit on your own machines, that works too: it goes beside your BigBlueButton servers, and none of your meetings ever pass through us. We apply the updates, at a time you pick, and the agreement covers your servers as well as ours.

It has also been examined by people with no reason to be generous about it. The technical leadership at Mainz University assessed ZcaleRight in depth while building the BigBlueButton cluster for the universities and schools of Rhineland-Palatinate, and recommended it on technical grounds. That was an independent review by senior engineers, not a customer testimonial, and it is worth more than one.

It is built and supported by the team that runs BigBlueButton clusters in production every day, as a BigBlueButton Certified Service Provider. That is why the product looks like this, and why the person who answers your call has already met your problem. Everything else, including who runs it and the operational questions answered plainly, is at zcaleright.com.