The Webex Edge - OBTP, CVI, and WebRTC... Oh My! - All about Hybrid Calendar

hey everybody it's dustin again with the webex devices team and today it's all about hybrid calendar so we've done quite a few videos um kind of showing off this feature i've done some one button to push demos we've done it with the webrtc guest join with the new microsoft integration we have including cvi which is getting ready to go generally available i know we got a lot of people excited about that so we've demonstrated how to to do this but what i haven't done is really spent a lot of time or talking about how the process actually works and so we've had a lot of questions around this and so what i thought i'd do today would be a little bit more of a technical overview of the hybrid calendar uh service and kind of how it works we're not going to go too deep into the weeds but we are going to go uh talking a little bit about some of the individual processes as well as give you some tips and tricks as to how you can make the service work better for you and then i might even kind of show you or talk about a few of the feature enhancements we've got coming down the road so the reason this is important is especially with some of the new announcements we've had with the microsoft integration there are a few things that may or may not cause some of these services to work correctly in your environment and a lot of times it's not really anything but more of a configuration issue so kind of talking through how the service works at a high level and uh understanding how you can make some changes will hopefully help fix or alleviate any of these issues that you may have so um we're going to talk about this again a little bit technical some things are going to be a little bit simplified um so bear with me they're not exactly maybe a little more complicated than i'm making them sound but it's really more for the flow and just kind of get the point across and if you have any questions obviously you can reach out directly or fill out some comments below and we'll reply but um so in general when it comes to hybrid calendar there's really two different types of uh you know modes i guess if you will that we would be able to process these meetings for and it's going to be for users or for devices that are on personal mode and then we've also got shared mode devices or room resources account room resource calendars so personal mode is pretty easy and i think everybody gets that it's basically hybrid calendaring for the user now when you enable a user for hybrid calendaring that allows them to do all kinds of features with webex it allows you to do the at webex options um it is used with the teams client if you're using it it also has if you have a personal mode device like a dx or a desk pro even a board like we have here it's what's going to provide that one button to push experience automatically for that user if they are enabled now shared mode devices are a little different obviously there are usually conference rooms things that you want to book or schedule and we've done some demos of this where we've invited them into a meeting so very similar scenario except for the fact that it's not tied to a user it has its own resource mailbox and we we set that up inside of control hub and then when we do that we're able to then do uh the processing push that meeting invitation down to the device and then when it comes time for that meeting to happen you walk into that room and that one button to push is going to be there now this is the important part is that i kind of want to explain how we actually process these meetings there's kind of an order of operations if you will and this is a little bit simplified but i think it's an important understanding as to how this works so we primarily use a user and a meeting organizer as the the primary source of truth when it comes to processing these meetings so one common misconception about how we do this especially with room systems is that you are we would be reading the room's calendar and getting the information and then pushing it down to that device while we can do that that's actually not how we primarily process these meetings we typically rely on the owner or the user for a couple reasons but mainly because you know the owner or the meeting owner is typically the person who is going to have the most up-to-date information they're kind of the primary contact for this so whenever a hybrid calendar user uh sends a an invite out and they invite a shared system we've already got the ability to kind of scrape that invite and be able to see the meeting details whether it's a webex whether it's a webrtc join uh direct yes join for microsoft or just another generic sip uri for another platform as long as it follows our scraping capability standards we will be able to pull that information grab the the meeting title push that down as well as the time that is supposed to happen and the join method um to the device and it's going to be there readily available now how do we know that that room system is actually needing to get that pushed down well by default we actually will look at that organizer the owner the person's calendar when we look we actually can see who's being carbon copied so we know the email address of that room system that shared resource that device because it's been set up inside of hybrid calendar so since we're aware of that we now know that that device needs to be added and ready for one button to push and because we have the meeting information for that user we can now use that same information push it down to that device and and that's generally how most of our meetings are going to be you know scheduled and how we're going to be able to process that information now there are scenarios where we have to do something and it's kind of a fallback or a secondary tier of the order of operations and it's what we call attendee based processing now in this scenario this is something that we've that we've kind of recently started doing and there's a couple reasons why we'll go into it but if for some reason that meeting organizer is not hybrid calendar enabled or they don't have it set up we will actually fall back to what we call attendee based processing and because we realize that that we know about that calendar that's in that meeting we know that there is a meeting for that room resource we will then fall back and actually read the uh information from that attendee and be able to process that meeting there so if that calendar has all that same information the meeting url or the webex that we're joining the webrtc link the time the date the subject etc we will then be able to put um all of that information on that device even if that owner is not hybrid calendar enabled so that's a little bit complex but not really um so the biggest takeaways here is that the owner of the meeting we will process that first and be able to tell that a device is is uh invited if not we will fall back to what we call attendee-based processing and then we will be able to look at that calendar and be able to push that information down now a couple reasons why this is important um number one you know i kind of mentioned that you may not have a user enabled for hybrid calendar so where's the scenario where this may happen now while we would love for every user to have a webex account and be able to use webex for their meeting platform we realize uh that sometimes that's not the case there may be microsoft teams for example is your meeting platform of choice but you want to use the cisco devices so you may not want to sync all of your users to the the webex cloud and you may just have your devices set up there so in this particular case we wouldn't be able to read that user's calendar so we would have to fall back to what we call attendee based processing and we would then have to look at that device's calendar to be able to push that information down so that's a pretty common scenario that we have and you know in order for us to be able to get that information we have to be able to look at that calendar to be able to get that to there since again we don't have access to that user calendar so that can provide some challenges with uh exchange and and even google but we're going to talk mostly about office 365 today or the exchange platform and i'm going to kind of do a little quick demo and we're going to show you what happens and i'm going to show you a little tip and trick about some some powershell commands you're going to have to do in order to make this happen and make it happen properly so let me switch over here now to uh my display so you guys can see me working here so i've got control hub up here uh the only reason i have this up right now is just to kind of talk about how you know for those who haven't seen i am going to go ahead and look at my workspaces here and i'm going to pull up my my board behind me which i've used in most of my demos just to kind of show that we do have this setup right here that i have the calendaring set up it is set up for office 365 this is the email address so you kind of see here that this is the the information that we get um you also have a feature here now to be able to view future schedule meetings i don't think i have any right now um so that would show up there but you know it's important to make sure that you have your device set up with the office 365 integration and of course you've got your users here which you can set up for hybrid calendar as well now what i'm going to do here is i'm just going to go ahead and bring up my trusty microsoft teams app just because it kind of it's just a way for me to kind of show you some demos here so i'm going to go ahead and create a meeting and what i'm going to do here is i'm going to call this hyb hybrid calendar demo and i'm going to actually invite two room resources so i'm going to invite the webex board 85 that we've done for almost all my videos and i've also got a demo room resource calendar set up right here so i'm going to write two calendars and the reason i'm going to do this is i'm going to show you something that could be a challenge for a lot of people and it's an important part of this uh for for you guys to understand here so i'm just gonna go ahead and create this uh 30 minutes is fine we're going to send this meeting out and this is going to go to the back end it's going to these room resources are set to automatically accept these so they're going to accept this invite and what i'm going to do now is i'm going to look at my hybrid calendar actually see here this is in personal mode so we talked about that so this is under that that user's calendar uh and it's sitting right here uh so uh we're also going to look right here and on my um what changes today so this is today and this is the demo that i just uh i ran and my name is uh posted all over here so this pink is my actual calendar so this is the hybrid calendar demo i've got and if you'll see here if i look at it there's the teams meeting information that's been sent the demo room resources has accepted so has the web export 85 behind me actually you see the one button to push behind me here on the board but i've got on here i'm looking at the webexport 85s and the demo room resource calendars here so let's look at the um well first of all just off the differences here if you'll notice that on the titles here on the demo room resource and this is just a room resource that i had just created yesterday for this um it's got the name dustin baker on it and then over here on the red x board it's got hybrid calendar demo and of course my name on it as well now when i open up this calendar you're going to see here that it has got the title hybrid calendar demo it's got the meeting information in here it's got the time and everything's good to go so remember we talked about how our processing worked so if i had a user that wasn't hybrid calendar enabled so it means that our web service and hybrid calendar service had no clue or wasn't able to look at in this particular instance my calendar then it would fall back to the attendee based processing and it would actually need to read the information in this invite for the device the 85 board s to be able to push that one button to push info down like you see back here so in this particular scenario everything would work just fine now i just want to show you this demo room resource when i double click on it if you'll notice here that the title actually is just my name because i'm the one that booked it and you'll notice that there's no information in here there's nothing in the body so this is important to understand that if you consider that same scenario and dustin was not hybrid calendar enabled and i go to book this room so our hybrid calendar service knows about this uh calendar and it goes to read this invite to get the information the information doesn't exist it's not here matter of fact it just has my name it knows i know that there's a meeting between this time but i have no idea about any meeting details or joint information so the problem here is in that scenario the hybrid calendar wouldn't be able to put that one button to push information on that system so this is a very very key point here is that you know if you don't have your users enabled you have to make sure that your room calendar resources are able to show and share that information now why is this like this so actually i don't know why it's like this but i can tell you that with office 365 by default what happens is is that the room resources whenever they're created they have some calendar processing rules that are available and one thing that they do is they delete the subject they delete the comments so the information inside the body of the of the email and they also add the organizer so whoever created the meeting to the subject line so they delete the subject they add whoever organizes it to the subject line and they delete the comments so in this particular instance here if you look at it on this calendar you'll notice that it kept the subject it did not replace it with my name and it kept the comments if i look at this calendar comments are deleted the subject has been deleted and it added my name to the subject field so this is the default for room resources with office 365 in exchange so what we have to do is we have to do some powershell commands to change this behavior to allow our uh our meeting information to stay populated inside the the meeting so i'm going to bring you here to this tab here and this is just basically the powershell command called set calendar processing so what this is is the it's the powershell command you're gonna have to use now i'm not gonna do a demo on exactly how to get into powershell i do have powershell up so i'm gonna show you a couple of these commands um and kind of show you how we have the differences here but these are all the variables that are available but most um most importantly we want to look at things like the delete comments um that we have available here we also have the add sub organizer to subject and then we also have the delete subject parameters there's a couple other parameters here that you can use for different things and we can talk about those in another video but these are the three that we're going to uh focus on uh right now um and so what i'm going to do here is actually bring up my powershell and one of the things i'm going to do is i'm actually just going to go ahead and and kind of give you an example here and i'm logged into powershell i've got a session imported i'm going to copy and paste this but what i'm doing here is i'm setting this calendar processing and i'm going to use the identity of dustin webexport at webex avengers.com that's the one that was already showing this so i've already done this but i'm going to show you this command again anyways and i'm taking the delete subject i'm making that value false which by default is true i'm taking the add organizer to subject false which is normally true and then delete comments to false as well which is normally true now i've got this one in here that says process external meeting messages i have that now set to true now there's a reason for that and i'm going to add that i'll talk about that at the end of this video because this is already going to be a long video and some people may want to just kind of skip that but we'll talk about that in a second um and how that would help so i'm going to go ahead and hit enter here and you'll see that i'm actually setting these and then the next thing i'm going to do here is i'm actually going to do now a get command and this is part of the powershell and i'm basically just going to do get calendar processing for my uh email account or room resource and then i'm going to this format list and what you're going to see here is it's basically getting all the values for me for that particular room resource and if you look here now i've actually got the delete comments it's set to false the delete subject is set to false and add organizer to subject also set to false so those settings that i did are actually there and available for me and what i'm going to do now is actually just do a get i'm doing this on the fly here get calendar processing and this time i'm going to do the demo room resource for you not format we're gonna do the same thing on the other one and if you look here look at some of these uh default settings delete comments true the delete subject also set to true add organizer to subject true so this is the default settings so if i don't go through and change that on my room resource i'm not going to be able to get that information so again in a nutshell and then just just to kind of harp over this because those settings are by default in uh microsoft office 365 in exchange this is going to provide a poor experience in general for my one button to push hybrid calendar if i do not have my users enabled for hybrid calendar so in this particular scenario because i have dustin enabled for hybrid calendar this room resource would still get one button to push this is not required for you to do this is only going to be required if you want to do what we call the attendee based processing and allow it to to be able to process that meeting for you and and push that one button to push information down again if you go ahead and make these changes and you're not having your users enabled this is required so that way we can actually obtain the information and and be aware of it to be able to push down now i want to go back and touch one more last thing here and this was the process external meetings or process external meeting messages true the reason i have this enabled is this allows me to and i'm not going to give you a scenario here so i have uh maybe a customer or someone that is inviting me to a meeting and one of the primary use cases for the direct guest join or the microsoft teams webrtc interop would be that you know maybe i use something else or maybe i have a team's tenant but i'm using the cvi solution because it's a better experience for me um but i have another uh customer or or a partner or someone that i'm dealing with that is inviting me to their team's tenant teams is very tenant based so that you know we've talked about that before um and so they don't have cvi and but you but you want to be able to take that meeting and you want to be able to to join it so when that meeting gets sent to me and um and i have that meeting i could then forward that meeting to one of my room systems so in this case we'll just talk about the uh the board 85. so i get that meeting and then i forward it to another system that's an external message so i need to enable this flag so that way outlook will be able to process that and then again with those same settings we'll be able to allow me to accept this and be able to have all those meeting details in there once i have that i'll be able to then um join that meeting get the one button to push and everything would work so um that flag is pretty important to enable too and these are flags that you can enable that you know if you just do a google search we can actually put up a demo script too that can make this apply to all of your room systems you can do these one at a time or you can do a script to make these powershell commands to all your systems um but uh it's important to kind of know that the the last thing that i want to mention here is kind of a little bit of a caveat to this today and this is something that we're working on and we will have some enhancements to it but it's not available today there is uh the ability to do this forwarding of messages however if the the person that is sending you that message um is hybrid calendar enabled um and we you then forward it to a room system uh on your uh uh on your org or your uh your company organization um that uh processing of that meeting will not work and i'm gonna try to explain to you why and this is a good reason and then what we're gonna do to help kind of fix that so remember when i talked before about the kind of order operations of how we process meetings we're going to have the meeting owner the meeting organizer we're going to process them first so if we realize that they are hybrid calendar user we're going to look that up then when we realize that there is an attendee we we will go ahead and push that information down well whenever you for that invite from another user who is hybrid calendar enabled the problem there is is that we realize that this person's hybrid calendar enabled we're going to use them primarily and we're going to use that as the single source of truth for this meeting information but the device that we're aware of is in a different organization and that's when we have a problem what we call crossover lookup so the problem there becomes that there's a security problem we don't want the hybrid calendar for this organization to be able to uh it doesn't have access to the uh you know information or the exchange environment for getting that information to this other organization so therefore we have no way of being able to process that meeting information and put it onto that device so today we fall back to the attendee based processing uh which allows for us to do this if a user is not enabled so in that same scenario someone sends me an invite i forward it to my device that person that originated that invite is not hybrid calendar enabled we will actually work with that because we fall back to the attendee-based processing we look at that calendar we are looking to do something called always attend the process which means that we will always be able to look at that calendar and be able to get that information in a scenario like that where we don't want to have the security crossover lookup so um a little bit complicated and it is one caveat that i wanted to mention but just know that we have some enhancements coming to that hopefully the next 30 to 60 days uh just stay tuned we'll do another video when that happens um but again sorry extremely long video we're up at about 20 something minutes now but this was very important to get out and i think it was going to be helpful for a lot of people if you have any questions please let us know and i look forward to you guys looking at these videos we really appreciate the feedback and engagement it's been great stay safe out there and we'll see you guys next time

Channel: The Collaboratory with Dustin

Views: 6,299

Keywords: Webex, cisco, edge, Collaboration, Roomkit

Id: Tw2dw0yu00o

Length: 22min 36sec (1356 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 05 2020