We have been evaluating SRS V2 and Logitech Smartdock for a couple of months now and we really like the solution. We have however found a problem that we would like some input on.
Joining the SRS V2 system to an externally hosted Skype Meeting.
As shown in the app itself, to do this the organizer should invite the room acoount to the meeting. Simple solution, but requires the organizer to do something he already did when he invited one of our users to the Skype meeting.
We thought the best solution for this scenario would be to forward the calendar item (the Skype Meeting) to the room account as this had been tested with internal usage (i.e a receptionist can forward meetings from a users account to the room resource in case of a change in meeting rooms etc).
First issue was that the room resource does not accept external adresses. Easily fixed by changing a setting on the room resource via PowerShell. (When you forward an external meeting invite to the internal room resource, the room resource sees the invite with the external senders adress, not the internal users adress).
So now the room resource accepts meeting invitations and forwarding of meetings from external senders. It even shows up in the SRS device. The problem is that the SRS device does not recognize the meeting as a Skype meeting.
After a lot of research we found out the following:
- SRS requires the MAPI property OnlineMeetingExternalLink. If it does not find this property with the link to the Skype Meeting URL, it does not recognize the meeting request as a Skype Meeting.
- If you add this property with the URL from the "Join Skype Meeting" link in the body of the meeting request to the calendar item, it shows up correcly as a Skype Meeting on the SRS device and works correctly. (We did this with the MFCMAPI editor)
The reason that forwarding meeting requests works interally in an organization is that the property OnlineMeetingExternalLink is preserved when sending internally in Exchange. When you send a Skype Meeting request out of your organization, the standard settings in Exchange strip this information from the meeting request. You can change this according to this article: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb310786%28v=exchg.150%29.aspx
The catch is that changing the TNEF settings has to be done on the organizers end, and it is not possible for everyone to do that.
At this point we started brainstorming ideas to hack together a solution which would:
- Find the URL to the Skype Meeting in the body of the meeting request
- Insert this URL with the MAPI property OnlineMeetingExternalLink to the calendar object in the room resource
No progress has been made on that, so I would like to ask the developers of the SRS V2 app to look into this as it would make the system much more robust in regards to handling Skype Meeting requests. The ability for our users to simply forward meeting requests or calendar objects to whatever room resource with SRS installed that is available would make this solution extremely simple in use.
The app is already so easy to use that everyone can just start using it, but by adding this functionality it would make the whole process extremely easy to use.
If anyone else has similar experiences I would really like to hear them, or if you solved this issue somehow that would be awesome!
