The updated API guide for Service Release 3 of the 2007 Live Meeting Service is now available via the Live Meeting Developer Center on MSDN.  The most substantial change in this release is the addition of Easy Assist.  Easy Assist is a simple and powerful tool for remote support scenarios.  At its core is a lightweight client that can be quickly installed on an end users machine.  This client allows a support agent to take control of the end users desktop, enabling quick troubleshooting and resolution of issues.  The Microsoft support organization has been using this tool for a while now, so if you have called our support group you may have already come across Easy Assist.  I have seen it in action a couple of times and I was very impressed.

Easy Assist is available to all LiveMeeting Professional customers, and as of today is deployed to most if not all conference centers.  Easy Assist sessions are scheduled through the same API’s as regular Live Meeting sessions.  They are differentiated by setting the tag option with the value “_EA”.  A handfull of new options were added at the meeting and user levels for supporting Easy Assist.  As usual we have designed the changes so that well behaving applications will not be affected.  I have included an excerpt of the new API guide which has more details of the change.

I’ll be speaking about the XML-API’s this summer at the TechEd developer conference.  So if you are interested in learning more about the API’s, or developing MS unified communications applications in general, check it out.  Also, if you already signed up be sure to register for my session.

Link to Event: http://www.microsoft.com/events/teched2008/developer/default.mspx

TechED Developers 2008 | North America

Orange County Convention Center

Orlando, FL

Date: June 3-6, 2008

Session: UNC202: Programming Conferencing Solutions with the Microsoft Office Live Meeting Service XML API

The 2007 update of the LiveMeeting service began its rollout to production last week.  At this point all new LiveMeeting conference centers will be provisioned on the new version.  This includes trial cc’s, so if you’ve been wondering what LiveMeeting  is all about now’s as good a time to see what we have to offer.   https://trials.messaging.microsoft.com/

For you API developers the updated developer guide is now available on Microsoft Download Center.  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=429e61d6-a172-4bcc-9184-d5f34e9d5e30&displaylang=en  The guide includes a description of all API modifications, some updated tutorials and best practices, and as usual a complete reference.

I want to once again urge anyone responsible for existing XML-API applications to join the Beta program and test them against the new service version.

Anyone is going to this years Tech Ed in Orlando should make sure to stop by the Unified Communication Technical Learning Center to check out Live Meeting 2007 and all of the other great UC products. 

Along with spending some time at the demo booths I will be doing an interactive theater session on the XML_API's.  The talk is titled "Integrate with the Microsoft Office Live Meeting Service through the XML APIs" and is 10:30AM-11:45AM on 6/4.  The session ID is UNC06-TLC.  I'm looking forward to the chance to meet with you.

Also don't miss my boss's talk.  UNC243 - "Hosted Conferencing: Delivering Enterprise-Class Voice, Video, and Web Conferencing with Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2007"  Thursday, June 7 9:45 AM - 11:00 AM, N220 E. 

Some of you have noticed that when creating a meeting with the XML-API’s the LiveMeeting service does not send out meeting invitations.

People often are confused by the existence of two meeting options,

audienceListEmail and presenterListEmail that seem to suggest that it will do just that.  Specifying email addresses in this filed will not result in email being sent.  These options are there to allow you to specify the email addresses of presenters and attendees of the meetings.  These email addresses will be visible in the LiveMeeting UI, where invitations can in fact be sent to these users.

So how do you send an invitation.  The easiest approach is to take advantage of the meeting options audienceInviteText and presenterInviteText.  Request these options when creating or listing a meeting and the service will return the text of the meeting invitation for this meeting.  Here is an example request.

<PlaceWareConfCenter authUser="apiuser" authPassword="Pa$$w0rd">

  <CreateMeetingRequest

      maxUsers="100"

      name="kick"

      title="Tailspin Toys 2000 Kickoff">

    <OptionList>

      <TimeOption name="startTime" value="2004-04-01T18:00:00Z"/>

      <TimeOption name="endTime" value="2004-04-01T20:00:00Z"/>

      <StringOption name="timeZone" value="America/Los_Angeles"/>

    </OptionList>

    <FieldList>

      <Name>mid</Name>

      <Name>audiencePassword</Name>

      <Name>presenterPassword</Name>

      <Name>AudienceInviteText</Name>

      <Name>presenterInviteText</Name>

    </FieldList>

  </CreateMeetingRequest>

</PlaceWareConfCenter>

You can take the text directly out of the response and send it via email, IM, or anything else.

Downloading a recording from the live meeting service requires two steps.  This first is an API call that fetches a url for a specific recording.  For example the following XML snippet ...

<PlaceWareConfCenter authUser="caller id" authPassword="caller password">
  <GetURLRequest>
    <StringQuery fieldName="name" operator="=" value="meetingName"/>
    <OptionList>
      <StringOption name="recViewerCompany" value="Company"/>
      <StringOption name="recViewerName" value="jondoe"/>
      <StringOption name="recViewerEmail" value="jondoe@company.com"/>
      <EnumerationOption name="resourceType" value="WindowsMediaMovieRecordingDownload">
        <String>ESS</String>
        <String>PWP</String>
        <String>WindowsMediaMovieRecording</String>
        <String>WindowsMediaMovieRecordingDownload</String>
        <String>BasicRecording</String>
      </EnumerationOption>
    </OptionList>
  </GetURLRequest>
</PlaceWareConfCenter>

will return a reply with a url to a media file of the recording. 

<GetURLReply
   url = “string”>
</GetURLReply>

The returned URL can then be plugged into Microsoft Windows Media Player. The following code snippet shows how:

Importing WMPLib; // the dll is %windir%\system32\wmpl.dll
WMPLib.WindowsMediaPlayer player = null;

public void ViewResource(string url)
{
      player = new WMPLib.WindowsMediaPlayer();
      player.openPlayer(url);
}

A client application can also let a user save the recording to a local drive for viewing at a later time. This requires that the client application make an explicit (HTTPS GET) request to the conference center to retrieve the stream containing the recording.

The following is C# implementation of the HTTPS GET request for downloading a resource stream from a conference center.

public Stream GetResource(string url)
{
    
    // Get resource using HTTP GET with the url of a resource;
    HttpWebRequest myReq = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(url);
    myReq.Method = "GET";
    
    Stream respStream = null;

    HttpWebResponse myResp = null;
    myResp = (HttpWebResponse)myReq.GetResponse();

    if (myResp.ContentType == "application/octet-stream")
    {
        respStream = myResp.GetResponseStream();
    }

    return respStream;
}

The stream can then be saved to a file. The following is one example in C#.

public void DownloadResource(string url, string filePath)
{
    Stream res = GetResource(url);
    if (res == null)
        return;

    FileStream fileStream = new FileStream(filePath, 
                                           FileMode.OpenOrCreate);
    int length = 1024;
    Byte[] buffer = new Byte[length];
    int bytesRead = res.Read(buffer, 0, length);
    while (bytesRead > 0)
    {
        fileStream.Write(buffer, 0, bytesRead);
        bytesRead = res.Read(buffer, 0, length);
    }
    fileStream.Close();
    res.Close();
}

GetPostingURL is used to get the correct URL for a specific conference centers Live Meeting API processor.  This call should be made at the start of each API session.  Your conferences center's posting URL may change.  So the result of this call must not be hard coded in your application.  Also, long running applicitons should periodically refresh their posting URL.

The posting URL for a conference center can be retrieved using an https GET to the following URL. 

https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/<conference_center>/xml/4.0/GetPostingURLRequest

I have included a C# code sample that uses HttpWebRequest/Response to return the posting URL of a specific conference center.

Enjoy. And remember that this code is for informational purposes only, I make no warranties ... blah, blah, blah ... (don't sue me if it doesn't work).

public string GetPostingURLRequest(string confCenter){
    string strUrl = string.Empty;
    XmlDocument xmldoc = new XmlDocument();
    // Get the posting URL.
    getPostingUrl = String.Format(
        https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/{0}/xml/4.0/GetPostingURLRequest,
        confCenter);

    // Send the GetPostingURLRequest message to the conference center;
    HttpWebRequest myReq = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(getPostingUrl);
    myReq.Method = "GET";
    HttpWebResponse myResp = null;

    try
    {
        // Get the response from the conference center
        myResp = (HttpWebResponse)myReq.GetResponse();
        Stream respStream = myResp.GetResponseStream();
        if (myResp.ContentType == "application/xml")
        {
            StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(
                                      respStream, Encoding.UTF8);
            xmldoc.Load(respStream);


            // Retrieve the url attribute of <GetPostingURLReply>
            XmlNode attrUrl = xmldoc.SelectSingleNode(
                    /PlaceWareConfCenter/GetPostingURLReply/@url);
            if (attrUrl != null)
                strUrl = attrUrl.Value;
        }
    }
    catch (Exception e)
    {
        // Log the error message or do other error handling routines.
        Console.WriteLine("Exception: {0}\nTrace: {1}", 
                                 e.Message, e.StackTrace);
    }
    finally
    {
       if (myResp != null)
          myResp.Close();
    }
    return strUrl;
}