Services for desktop collaboration, webcasting, videoconferencing, etc. are offered through the Nordic NRENs to users in the R&E community. The services provided by NORDUnet allow (Nordic) NRENs to offer a comprehensive set of communications and video conferencing services to campus and mobile users.
Research and education is by its nature collaborative and global in reach. Researchers and students engage in a wide range of collaborations with partners from all parts of the world, and need dynamic and flexible access to high-quality communications platforms. In addition document and data sharing, e-mail, and other network-facilitated services, there is a need for real-time communications. The experience and benefit of such services are enhanced by the unique characteristics of the R&E networks, such as the ability to combine desktop communications with federated indentity-based access, security, and sharing, and the ability to use high-quality video conferencing enable by high speed networking.
Over the years NORDUnet has built up extensive experience in real-time communication services, specifically targeted at the needs of the research and education community. NORDUnet offers a range of platforms for such services.
The NORDUnet operated Zoom service is available to all organizations and projects within the Nordic NREN community through the local NREN in each country.
Since the early months of 2020 the request for the Zoom service has exploded. The need for institutions across both the Nordics and world-wide to be able to offer stable, secure and fast on-line education became very apparent.
Zoom is an easy-to-use high-definition virtual meeting service designed to meet the needs of today’s mobile Student and Educators.
Users can quickly connect to meetings with up to 500 participants and easily share content with a range of integrated tools using PC, Mac, iOS or Android devices. The NORDUnet Zoom partnership provides licensing with educational discounts tied to the use of NORDUnet provided infrastructure to support the Zoom cloud service. Zoom can be integrated with learning management systems utilising a simple “URL Click to Call” function making it easy for educators to create virtual classrooms that are accessible across a range of devices, including laptops, tablets and smartphones. Because Zoom allows guests to easily join meetings, it is also a game-changing collaboration platform for researchers working with partners across institutions.
The NORDUnet Zoom video and web conferencing service is based on the Zoom on premise solution with a redundant centralized installation hosted in NORDUnet Hosting Centres within the Nordic region and supports the available options and features as described further below.
This is a true cloud service where each organisation subscribing to the service will get its own virtual instance of the service.
Each virtual instance of the service will get its own meeting connector in order to be able to connect SAML and integrate other Zoom services that uses a shared secret. A meeting connector is a virtual host that is set up in the NORDUnet on-premise Zoom environment, meaning that no video traffic or other meeting details from the on-prem solution will leave the Nordics.
The NORDUnet Zoom on-premise solution handles all regular video traffic relating to the use of Zoom via the App’s, clients, H.323, and Zoom rooms. There are, however, a few exceptions like the use of PSTN, the direct web browser access and specialised connectors like Skype for Business, these gateway functions are not supported on-prem and will use the regular Zoom public cloud gateways.
The service is based on an on-premise server infrastructure operated by NORDUnet.
Zoom comes with a long list of integration possibilities, for both LMS systems and media management etc., the full list can be found here… https://zoom.us/integrations
Detailed information about setting up the various integrations is available. https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/categories/200108426-Integration
Generic information about the various features and options can be found at the Zoom website
Dedicated information aimed at the education sector https://zoom.us/education
Technical information about the on premise deployment
https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/categories/201146653-On-Premise
To get started there is a wealth of free information, online training and tutorials available
https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/sections/201740096-Training
This includes
The NORDUnet Zoom service is available to all organizations and projects within the Nordic NREN community through the NREN in each country.
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