Forum Discussion
SRS V2 externally hosted meetings
Hi Anders
Happy to inform you the "hole" is now gone!:-)
Can't see that MS has created a knowlegde base article on this yet so I just include the text from the closing of the premier support ticket:
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Symptom:
The SRSv2 UI only showed a “…” button, instead of a “Join” button, when receiving meeting invitations from remote parties that did not have TNEF enabled for contoso.com.
Cause:
The calendar processing rules for the SRSv2 room mailbox did remove the meeting content. With that, the meeting join links got removed too and the SRSv2 device could not identify that the meeting is an online meeting.
Resolution:
Setting “Set-CalendarProcessing meetingroom101@contoso.com -DeleteComments $false” resolved the issue.
More information:
The Skype Room System v2 tries to extract a meeting link out of a meeting invitation in several ways.
First (with TNEF enabled), we are searching through the non-viewable content of the meeting invitation. With TNEF enabled on the sender side and when sending the invitation using the Skype for Business Add-in, the meeting invitation meta data will contain meeting join information. That is the reason, why it always worked throughout our testings, when TNEF was enabled.
As an additional step, we are also trying to parse the viewable content of the meeting invitation. The SRSv2 code is searching for links, using http://, https:// and the HTML tag <a href>. If we find links, we try to identify if they are normal links to the Internet, or if the link is indeed a meeting join link. In case we identify a valid join link, the UI of the SRSv2 console will show the Join button.
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/ivar
Hi Anders
We came across the same problem and opened a case at MS Premier Support. They confirmed that this was a known issue (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt691563.aspx) but have sent this to the SRS product team for future releases, I really hope they fix it.
Only workaround we have found is to join the Skype meeting from a PC and then add the room as a participant via the O365 SfB client.
/ivar
Hi Ivar,
Good to see that I'm not the only one noticing this "hole" in the SRS Solution.
Thanks for opening up a case with MS Support as well.
That workaround is actually something we have not looked at yet, but in theory it seems like a workaround that actually would work for us.
We are currently planning to buy SRS units for all our meeting rooms, even with the problems described in this thread. Our planned workaround was to have a regular laptop available and then simply plug in the HDMI from the SRS for Audio/Video and connect the Microphone and Camera USB ports usually connected to the SRS unit to the laptop and connect with the normal SfB client. We would still have to do this to connect to other videoconferencing solutions than Skype.
I'm always up for sharing experiences regarding this system, so feel free to message me.
Anders
Hi Anders
Happy to inform you the "hole" is now gone!:-)
Can't see that MS has created a knowlegde base article on this yet so I just include the text from the closing of the premier support ticket:
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Symptom:
The SRSv2 UI only showed a “…” button, instead of a “Join” button, when receiving meeting invitations from remote parties that did not have TNEF enabled for contoso.com.
Cause:
The calendar processing rules for the SRSv2 room mailbox did remove the meeting content. With that, the meeting join links got removed too and the SRSv2 device could not identify that the meeting is an online meeting.
Resolution:
Setting “Set-CalendarProcessing meetingroom101@contoso.com -DeleteComments $false” resolved the issue.
More information:
The Skype Room System v2 tries to extract a meeting link out of a meeting invitation in several ways.
First (with TNEF enabled), we are searching through the non-viewable content of the meeting invitation. With TNEF enabled on the sender side and when sending the invitation using the Skype for Business Add-in, the meeting invitation meta data will contain meeting join information. That is the reason, why it always worked throughout our testings, when TNEF was enabled.
As an additional step, we are also trying to parse the viewable content of the meeting invitation. The SRSv2 code is searching for links, using http://, https:// and the HTML tag <a href>. If we find links, we try to identify if they are normal links to the Internet, or if the link is indeed a meeting join link. In case we identify a valid join link, the UI of the SRSv2 console will show the Join button.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
/ivar
As I understand it - the (unpublished) article above means that the external user needs to invite the room for this to work. Microsoft is investigating if it would be possible to simply cut'n'paste the join-URL from the meeting where the SRS system would search for the https:// join URL to join the meeting but this solution is still under investigation. Correctly understood?
Hi Jonas, haven't tried copy&paste but an easy workaround if the external user hasn't invited the meeting room is to just for you to forward the invitation to the meeting room yourself in Outlook, works like a charm!
- Thanks for sharing the response from MS Ivar :)
We tested the solution and it works great. SRSv2 parses join links in the email body. It also works on rewritten join links, in case you have a spamfiter that rewrites all HTML links - as ours does.
Thanks again.
Anders
