I’m hoping someone can help me understand what spreed.me is. I know on ownCloud it’s an app that allows me to communicate through audio/video/text. But what exactly is it? Does it run from my Nextcloud server or does spreed.me connect to an outside server/service to grant me this communication.
I also can’t find a price to use it. Is spreed.me free?
I’ll be moving from using ownCloud to Nextcloud and spreed.me looks very interesting but I would prefer that the ability to communicate all be done from my local Nextcloud server and not a server out in the cloud somewhere.
Can someone confirm for me that I’ll be able to use spreed.me from my Nextcloud local server.
I’m very excited to hear that Spreed.Me is something I can implement and use completely within our lan. I had missed seeing that the Spreed WebRTC server could be installed on my server as well which is the missing piece I was looking for.
I have further questions about Spreed.Me and how the possible uses for it within our office. Is there a forum for Spreed.Me I can ask these questions or would this NextCloud forum suffice?
Thank you for your continued assistance. This is awesome that you are involved in answering my questions…what a great product and support you provide!
Let’s keep it here so we can all learn.
I’m hoping you can clarify or confirm if my plan to use Spreed.Me will work in our small office.
We are small with 14 workstations. 3 of which have Internet access…the remaining 11 do not have Internet access (they are locked down from the Internet in our security gateway).
Potentially any of these 14 workstations may need screensharing assistance from a vendor we’ve purchased software from. So if we have an issue we’ve allowed this vendor VPN access into our network to provide support.
That’s how we are currently setup. We are looking to buy another software where that Vendor will also be able to provide remote support. They are a larger vendor where they won’t be installing a VPN client for access into our LAN on all their Support Staff’s computers. So I want to find a way to allow them to remote into any of our workstations for remote assistance (screen share) and still keep our 11 workstations locked down from Internet access. Please confirm if by using Spreed.Me I could do the following:
Install NextCloud on our LAN and create an account for all of our employees. This NextCloud server in our office will have access to the Internet.
Install a Spreed WebRTC server in our LAN that will be used by Spreed.Me on our Nextcloud. If necessary I can give Internet access to this Spreed WebRTC server.
If a user in our office logs into our locally installed NextCloud from any of our 14 workstations, could they invite support staff from this new vendor into a screenshare for that workstation for remote assistance?
Thanks in advance for any help you can provide me.
No video- and audio-traffic goes over the Spreed WebRTC server whatsoever.
Spreed WebRTC is only used to help you finding your partner(s). (It is sometimes used for the chat messages, but I’m not going to cover this here…)
Screensharing really only means “screen sharing”, it doesn’t allow you to remote-control a computer.
WebRTC tries to use Peer-To-Peer connections, which means it first tries to connect directly to your partner’s IP.
If that didn’t work (due to NAT / Firewall restrictions), you can use a TURN server as a relay between you and your partner.
Try: You <–> Your partner
If previous option failed and you have a TURN server: You <–> TURN server <–> Your partner
In your case option 1. will fail from all workstations which do not have Internet access.
With the help of a TURN server it should however work.
The TURN server should be accessible by all your 14 intranet workstations and from the Internet (access to it must be at least allowed for all your partner’s IPs).
Maybe a TURN server is an option for you?
Good to know how the Spreed WebRTC server factors in.
So in order to connect to a partner or contact…For the workstations where we do have Internet access we would ask our partner for their IP Address. If our partner or contact doesn’t have a static IP address we potentially will need to ask them each time what their IP is so we can update our contact in Nextcloud before we connect with them. Once we have their IP address I’m guessing we update their contact information through our Nextcloud Spreed.Me app. What does our partner then need on their side to chat with us? Does our partner need to install a desktop app?
Good point on our partner IP’s allowing this connection from us as well.
I’ll take away your suggestion at using a TURN server for our workstations that don’t have Internet access.
a TURN server, which can be accessed by both your intranet workstations and your Internet-partner(s)
Spreed WebRTC, which can also be accessed by your intranet workstations and your partner(s)
both of you simply open Spreed WebRTC in a web browser and should be able to call each other.
Only the TURN server / Firewall has to be configured to allow access from your partner’s IP. As soon as that is done, you don’t need to enter or know your partner’s IP anymore.
