Like many others, I was excited when Dimdim announced its open source web conferencing tool in 2006. I was even happier when DimDim integrated its product with Moodle. However, my early experiences with DimDim standalone and the integration with Moodle weren't good.
Initially, I tried to install the community edition of DimDim on Ubuntu, and despite lots of discussions with the folks at DimDim, I never got it off the ground. In their defense, I was using an early version of the DimDim alpha, and DimDim did a great deal to try to help me. And, I know some others did succeed. Also, there is a virtual machine edition of DimDim running on CentOS, but I work in an Ubuntu shop and was stubbornly determined to use my preferred distribution.
Given these problems, I started to use the free edition of DimDim hosted by DimDim. This worked better. In fact, it worked very well and DimDim kept making improvements to its application and added many new features that make it a product competitive with pricey options such as Wimba or Elluminate.
However, when I installed the Moodle integration pack v 1.6, things fell apart again. There were two serious bugs: first, only administrators could create and start a meeting; second, there was a problem with the conference keys being inconsistent, so students could not seemlessly join a meeting.
I continued to use the standalone version with excellent results. Recently, I installed the new integration pack (v4.5), and to my delight, everything works. The interface DimDim provides in Moodle for creating classes is not very attractive and should probably have some sensible default values set, but overall, things work very well.
If you'd like to install the integration pack, don't download it from Moodle.org. The integration pack version available there is out of date. There is an issue posted in the Moodle bug tracker about this, but it hasn't been updated in some time. Instead, try this link to the DimDim forums to get the new integration pack:
http://forums.dimdim.com/forum/attachment.php?s=70e373b51a02e1a1908a07571830d931&attachmentid=38&d=1230898136
There's also a nice, quick introduction to DimDim available on youTube.
Keep Moodling.
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