How Approved Contact uses the new Meeting Details API
June 18, 2019Last week we introduced the capability to programmatically get the Webex meeting join information for a space via the Space Meeting Details API. Before now, you were only able to get the SIP video address of the space. Not anymore. Now you can get much more: the Webex meeting URL, dial-in phone numbers, and the video address. Meeting attendees can use the Webex meeting URL to quickly join the meeting from any client. There are still many people that join meetings by dialing in over the phone. And why not? PSTN connectivity still works great. And for those users that want to join via VoIP, or a video application or system, the video address to join the meeting is also available.
The API works by adding /meetingInfo
to any rooms
resource. Imagine you have an existing API call that looks like this:
GET https://api.ciscospark.com/v1/rooms/S0xMWU5LTliOWUtNzd
...and has a response of...
{
"id": "S0xMWU5LTliOWUtNzd",
"title": "Meeting Info blog post",
"type": "group",
"isLocked": false,
"lastActivity": "2019-06-18T15:38:04.846Z",
"creatorId": "DAzYi0zZTY5ZDc2ZTZjNzg",
"created": "2019-06-13T16:41:56.827Z"
}
If you'd like to get the space's meeting information, you can add /meetingInfo
to the end of that API call:
GET https://api.ciscospark.com/v1/rooms/S0xMWU5LTliOWUtNzd/meetingInfo
...and you'll get a response that looks like this:
{
"roomId": "S0xMWU5LTliOWUtNzd",
"meetingLink": "https://cisco.webex.com/m/a32160d6-d0fd",
"sipAddress": "5559999@cisco.webex.com",
"meetingNumber": "5559999",
"callInTollFreeNumber": "+1-866-432-9903",
"callInTollNumber": "+1-408-525-6800"
}
The meeting information you get from the API is exactly the same as a user sees if they open up the Schedule activity menu in the Webex space.
Exciting? Let’s see what our friends at Approved Contact did with this new meeting information. We all know how challenging, painful, and frustrating it is to schedule a meeting with users in different companies. Users can’t see each others’ calendars and there is always a constant back and forth of sharing available times to decide on a time that works. Approved Contact is doing some very interesting things to solve that problem.
We are very happy to be a part of their solution. First, you add the Approved Contact bot to a space. The bot takes you through the flow of finding a suitable time slot in all the users’ calendars. It includes the detailed meeting information of the space in the calendar invite. Guess where it gets the meeting information from? The new meeting information API. “With Teams now making the meeting info available via a REST API, we have allowed users of our Calendar bot to schedule a meeting in Cisco Webex at the perfect open time for everybody in the space.” Nathan Yorke, CIO – Approved Contact. “Scheduling meetings with a group of people could take days, but you can now do it in a few minutes.”