Hi,
A professor called up regarding collaboration tools, claiming that he and his students could not access the virtual meeting set up, regardless of browser, operating system, and computer.
At my desk, both my Windows and Mac machines are up to date, and I replicated the problem. You would click the name of either the chat or the virtual classroom, and nothing would pop up. Is this something that is a problem on our side?
I know my Java is updated, and with the virtual classroom, I tried to click on the compatible version.
Here's a video of my progress.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10058675/BBL/Untitled/Untitled.html
SUNY Cortland's instructional designer
John,
First off, you really shouldn't need to be clicking the "Click here for an accessible version" in the Virtual Classroom in general. That really just opens the "chat" area of the virtual classroom, for those who are using a screen reader, but the regular Virtual Classroom window should open automatically. Virtual Classroom, its "accessible" version, and Chat all use a java applet to open the tool in a new window, so if you have pop-ups blocked or have the java plug-in disabled in Firefox, that would prevent the new window from opening.
In IE, you have the applet opening in a new window, but it's not able to connect to the collaboration server. There is a fairly long KB article on Behind the Blackboard at: http://kb.blackboard.com/display/KB/Troubleshooting+Blackboard+Collaboration+Tools which is worth having a look at. However, here are the first things I'd check:
1) Is the Collaboration server up and running on your Blackboard server?
2) If there's a firewall set up on the server, is it configured to allow connections to the Collaboration server ports (8010, 8011, and 8443 for SSL)?
3) If you are using SSL, especially system wide, have you added the SSL certificate to the Collaboration server keystore?
4) If you're using a custom language pack, have you added that to the Collaboration server?
5) If the collaboration tools were working before and you've upgraded recently, have you flushed out the Java cache on your client machine? Older versions of the collaboration tool applets can be cached, and may not work with the new Collaboration server after an upgrade.
6) Are the java plugins and pop-ups from the Blackboard server enabled on the client browser?
Mike
I'm also having the same issue after upgrading to 9.1 SP8 on our test environment. When I click on the "Click to view Detailed Error" , it shows:
Java Plug-in 1.6.0_31Using JRE version 1.6.0_31-b05 Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM...load: class blackboard.plugins.chat.ui.LwChat not found.java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: blackboard.plugins.chat.ui.LwChat at sun.plugin2.applet.Applet2ClassLoader.findClass(Unknown Source) at sun.plugin2.applet.Plugin2ClassLoader.loadClass0(Unknown Source) at sun.plugin2.applet.Plugin2ClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source) at sun.plugin2.applet.Plugin2ClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source) at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source) at sun.plugin2.applet.Plugin2ClassLoader.loadCode(Unknown Source) at sun.plugin2.applet.Plugin2Manager.createApplet(Unknown Source) at sun.plugin2.applet.Plugin2Manager$AppletExecutionRunnable.run(Unknown Source) at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)Exception: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: blackboard.plugins.chat.ui.LwChat
Regards
Jim
Jim,
Have you followed the troubleshooting steps I suggested to John, and looked at the colloaboration tool troubleshooting article? If you just upgraded, I'd especially suggest clearing the Java cache...
Hi Mike,
Thanks. Just checked and found out that the collab service is not running.
Cheers
Please check if "bbconfig.collabserver.run.on.localhost" is set to "true" in bbconfig.properties.
This solved my problem.
Well - I figured out why this is happening.https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/blocked/p80
Details can be found there.
Thanks for the tips, everybody.