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All about Blackboard Collaborate

Blackboard Collaborate is the web conferencing application that we use in Fronter for live web based meetings.

In Fronter, there are two different ways to use Collaborate:

  1. In a room: ClassLive with whiteboard and chat that can be added to a room and entered by all the members of that room.
  2. As personal tool: Meeting can be added to the personal tool bar where up to three people can communicate and share desktop. This possibility is open for the students as well as teachers.

Please find more information on how to use the tools in our help or see Blackboard Collaborate’s own pages.

What are the technical requirements for using Blackboard Collaborate?

Please find the technical requirements in this article from Blackboard Collaborate.

Networks and ports

The Blackboard Collaborate service is run from a dedicated hosting site managed by Blackboard Collaborate, and after the migration in 2012, not from Fronter’s Oslo site. That is, in case you are using a firewall or proxy, you will need to ensure connections to bbcollab.com and all subdomains thereof are open (e.g. euwc04.bbcollab.com). The relevant IP ranges are (latest update Oct 6, 2014):

  • 46.183.243.0 with netmask 255.255.255.192 (in CIDR notation: 46.183.243.0/26)
  • 46.183.242.208 with netmask 255.255.255.240 (in CIDR notation: 46.183.242.208/28)

With respect to ports, Blackboard Collaborate primarily tries to connect to ports 2187 (non-encrypted) and 443 (encrypted), but it falls back on port 80 in both cases if the primary port is not available. Note that the as in general, we also recommend that no proxies are used when connecting to any Fronter services.

Also, configure your network’s firewall and web content filters to allow the download of both JNLP files (or content types) and Java application archive (JAR) files. Also configure users’ client systems to allow the download, installation, and execution of Java network applications.

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