Using teams as a saas conferencing solution

Copper Contributor

Hi,

We are a smallish company that currently uses Twilio to provide a solution where our users can interview experts. However many of our corporate customers are used to teams and often don't have the necessary whitelists for twilio to work properly. So we are looking into if teams is an option.

 

Our need is quite simple, via API create and reschedule meeting rooms with web links and dial-in numbers. The issue is that teams is centered around users, it's always a "user" that creates a meeting room.

 

One way to work around that is to

  • create a bunch of users
  • for any new or rescheduled meeting, in our back-end find a user that does not have a meeting at the given meeting time
  • create a meeting using that user and send links to our users in turn

 

Feels like it could get complicated quickly, signing in and out of user accounts to find one that has a free slot. This feels like a bit of a long shot, but, is there any other way to achieve this?

3 Replies

@FilipGr Nothing stops a Teams user having multiple overlapping meetings, each have their own separate dial in code etc.

 

The most elegant solution would be to give all your users Teams and Exchange Calendars, then use an app that calls the graph API to schedule meetings, inviting others as necessary.

 

See Create onlineMeeting - Microsoft Graph v1.0 | Microsoft Docs

@Steven Collierthanks for the quick reply.

 

I guess there is still a limit to how many simultaneous calls that would be? Been trying to google an answer, 4 seems to be some sort of limit but its rather unclear.

 

Creating teams accounts for everyone would be quite expensive. We have thousands of users but very sparse use. You might do 10 meetings for a specific project, but then months can pass before anything happens again.

@FilipGr There is no stated limit, maybe test for your self but I don't expect there to be one.

 

If your users aren't licensed they they will be joining the meeting as a guest user each time, this probably undesirable and not very secure. For example your meetings will need to be configured to be entirely open, no one waits in a lobby as there isn't anyone you can identify as a valid user. Chat will be complex, lots of things won't work right.

 

Imagine all the other services you can cancel, just move everything to Microsoft 365. Files to OneDrive, Email to Exchange, etc. etc.