During the last couple of months, we have had an increase in the amount of requests for online conferencing. Due to the nature of the task we set upon searching for a reliable and cost effective solution for our clients. There were many products in the lineup that we tried and tested, but only one came through in the end.

The Red 5 server is an open source community driven project to act as a Flash Streaming Server, it is a free alternative to Adobe LiveCycle Data Services Enterprise Suite, Wowsa Media Server Pro, and some others. Most of the other projects have some very restrictive licensing and due to the state of the economy we try to help our customers as best we can. So the selection was made to be Red 5.

Installation was a snap, the demos showed great potential to the system and we were excited to play around with Red 5. Red 5 was the last of the applications in the test run and turned out to be our saving grace to our customers. Although documentation is somewhat hard to come by, due to it being a community driven project all problems were remedied without too much of a struggle. Within 5 days of initial server build we had a Flash driven streaming conference server up and running. Some more detail on the process will be posted later this month!

Stay tuned!