It is exactly 50 years ago that the State of Lower Saxony on behalf of the University of Göttingen and the Max Planck Society established the Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung mbH Göttingen – GWDG for short – in a founding meeting. And even today, the construct of a computer and IT competence centre for science and research, co-financed by two associates, is still both a very successful and extraordinary concept: the synergies in the operation of modern high-performance computers, cloud services, tailor-made IT systems and applications, networks and a great number of other

We obtained a campus license for Zoom meetings. This enables all staff members of the University of Göttingen as well as the UMG Medical centre to access all Zoom functions including unlimited meetings up to 100 attendees. This is now available in time for the semester start. This is an alternative solution to our Big Blue Button (BBB) video conference service provided by GWDG. Licenses for larger meetings are available on request by e-mail to webconf@gwdg.de.

For using the campus license, a self-activation of your account is necessary in which you agree to us to provide account data (e-mail

GWDG now offers BigBlueButton (BBB) productively and with increased capacity at https://meet.gwdg.de. It serves as a video conferencing service, but can also be used for e-learning scenarios. It is thus also available for the summer semester. The service will be further expanded in the coming days for more functions and capacity.

As part of the COVID-19 crisis, we evaluated possible e-learning scenarios together with the e-learning team at the University of Göttingen.

After evaluating the open source tools Jitsi and BigBlueButton we decided on the latter. With BigBlueButton we offer a video

In order to simplify the access to videoconferencing services for our users, now also Zoom as well as Cisco WebEx are connected to our single sign-on infrastructure. This enables users to log on to the services with their home account and create meetings there. To do so, you need to activate your account which involves transmission of account data (e-mail address, first and last name, and institute affiliation) to Zoom. This requires your consent. You can find more information about Zoom and how to activate your account in our online documentation. Please note that Zoom is an external cloud

As part of the current COVID-19 crisis, we are currently evaluating possible e-learning scenarios together with the e-learning service team of the University of Göttingen.

We are currently focussing on BigBlueButton an open source video conferencing tool that, in addition to conventional video conference functions such as screen sharing and chat, is also suitable for e-learning scenarios. The tool is based on HTML5, runs in the browser and does not require any software installation.

BigBlueButton offers the following features that go beyond pure video conferencing:

• Upload and show