This disclosure relates generally to the field of video conferencing. More particularly, but not by way of limitation, this disclosure relates to a method of providing an interface between a meeting scheduling system and equipment utilized to facilitate the meeting whereby scheduling of a video conference, initiation of a video conference, and content shared before, during, or after a video conference may be automatically integrated with a meeting scheduling system (e.g., calendaring software application).
In today's corporate environment, it is typical to schedule meetings via meeting scheduling software. The meeting scheduling software sends a message to “meeting invitees” and usually allows for automatic creation of a calendar entry in the invited participants personal electronic calendar. Examples of meeting scheduling software include MobileMe available from Apple Inc., Cupertino, Calif. (MobileMe is a registered trademark of Apple Inc.); Google Calendaring available from Google, Inc., Mountain View, Calif.; Lotus Notes available from IBM corporation, Armonk, New York; Mozilla Sunbird available from Mozilla Corporation, Mountain View, Calif.; and Microsoft Outlook/Exchange available from Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, Wash.
Presently, scheduling and initiation of a video meeting may require a potential user to understand more about the technology and infrastructure equipment used in video conferencing than is strictly necessary. For example, some types of equipment run different signaling protocols and can have different dialing methods. Additionally, connection addresses for video conference equipment may not be standardized. Capacity capabilities of bridging equipment at times in the future should be taken into account when scheduling meetings (e.g., capacity at future meeting times). Furthermore, security of information describing a meeting may be important to a person scheduling a meeting. Because of these complexity issues and others the use of video collaboration tools may take too much time and energy on the part of a meeting organizer.
To overcome these and other shortcomings, a system and method to integrate or interface video conference rooms, video conference infrastructure equipment and personal electronic calendars is needed. Example embodiments disclosed herein include a method and system to provide: security for meeting information; interfaces for personal electronic calendar applications and video conferencing equipment; and implementations for video conferencing infrastructure components to integrate with meeting scheduling software. It would also be desirable for this information to be automatically made available via interfaces to the scheduling software (e.g., via a plug-in or extension to the regular interface software and integration modules in video conferencing infrastructure equipment) without a change in how a user interacts with existing meeting scheduling software.
In one embodiment, a conferencing device is configured with a programmable control device. The programmable control device can be programmed to receive indications of calendar events and data associated with the calendar event. Upon receipt of the scheduling information the programmable control device may cause infrastructure components necessary to facilitate a video conference to signal other infrastructure components to: initiate a conference, determine infrastructure requirements to support a conference, or perform capacity planning and allocation of conferencing equipment. At meeting initiation, call signaling infrastructures, which possibly run different signaling protocols (e.g., H.323, H.320, or Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)), may route calls with the same address to a common video conferencing bridge. Also, video bridges which are capable of mixing endpoints of the type invited into a meeting and available based on capacity may be selected to facilitate the video conference.
In another embodiment, a meeting organizer may have the capability to schedule a private meeting and invite public resources while concealing at least some of the private information pertaining to the video conference. For example, when a meeting organizer schedules a meeting, a public resource (e.g., physical conference room) may need to be allocated to facilitate the meeting. This allocation is typically implemented by providing a “meeting invitation” to the public resource. Because the public resource receives the meeting invitation the public resource interface may have access to details about a meeting that should not be disclosed to the public. Therefore, this embodiment allows a user to specify that certain information is not to be displayed at the public resource or made available to uninvited users who query the public resource for information.
In another embodiment, a method of maintaining meeting content is disclosed. A meeting scheduler (i.e., organizer) creates a meeting entry in meeting scheduling software. The organizer invites meeting participants and those able to attend, conduct a meeting or a conference. Any content recorded during the meeting can be associated to the original meeting invite automatically such that meeting participants and unavailable invitees can have access to the meeting content via the original calendar entry created in the meeting scheduling software.
Systems and methods to integrate or interface video conference rooms, video conference infrastructure equipment and personal electronic calendars are disclosed. Example embodiments include providing: security for meeting information; interfaces for personal electronic calendar applications, video conferencing equipment, and other shared resources; and implementations for video conferencing infrastructure components to integrate with meeting scheduling software. Also disclosed are systems and methods for making information automatically available via interfaces to the scheduling software (e.g., via a plug-in or extension to the regular interface software and integration modules in video conferencing infrastructure equipment) without a change in how a user interacts with existing meeting scheduling software. Although the methods and systems disclosed herein may at times refer to the Microsoft Outlook client and the Microsoft Exchange server, one of ordinary skill in the art, given the benefit of this disclosure, will recognize the inventive concepts disclosed herein are applicable to different calendaring and scheduling software implementations. Types of conferences include but are not limited to video conferences, web conferences, white board conferences, audio only conferences and, a mixture of types of conferences, among others. Throughout this disclosure, references to Outlook and Exchange specifically are simply examples of one implementation of a calendaring system client and calendaring system server respectively.
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Calendaring software server 150 is an example server to support one implementation of meeting scheduling software. Calendaring software server 150 is communicatively coupled to network 120. Calendaring software server 150 can be configured to support a meeting scheduling client application (e.g., Microsoft Outlook (not shown)) providing a calendar type interface to end users. End users of a network in a corporate environment are typically a superset of the users invited to a meeting (i.e., meeting invitees) and potentially become conference participants. As used herein, “meeting invitees,” includes all of the people and resources (e.g., conference rooms, conferencing equipment, etc.) receiving an invitation to the meeting. In some cases, these people will be selected by the meeting organizer while in other cases original invitees may forward the meeting invite to additional people.
Multipoint Control Unit (MCU) 160 is also communicatively coupled to network 120. Multipoint audio and/or multimedia calls are typically scheduled in advance through companies that own MCUs or audio bridges. An MCU 160 can provide the capability for two or more terminals to participate in a multipoint audio and/or multimedia conference. Additionally, an MCU 160 can host Virtual Meeting Rooms (VMRs) to support a multimedia conference. An audio bridge can provide the capability for two or more terminals to participate in a multipoint audio conference. In this disclosure the term MCU may also refer to an audio bridge used for multipoint audio conferences; therefore, in the description words such as MCU and audio bridge may have the same meaning A terminal is an end-point on a network, capable of real-time, two-way audio, data and/or visual communication with other terminals or an MCU 160. The information communicated between the terminals and/or the MCU 160 includes control signals, indicators, audio, moving color video, pictures and/or data. A terminal may provide speech only, speech and data, speech and video, or speech, data and video. One or more MCUs 160 may be configured to support a conference. One example of an MCU 160 is the RMX2000 provided by Polycom Inc., Pleasanton, Calif.
One or more conference rooms 170 may also be utilized during a conference. These conference rooms 170 may be physical conference rooms where meeting participants are physically present and in the proximity of cameras, microphones or other conference supporting equipment. Additionally, conference rooms 170 may be virtual conference rooms (e.g., VMRs hosted on an MCU bridge) where participants are not physically located but are logically grouped such that they appear to other participants as if they were in the same conference room. In each implementation of conference room 170 there can be one or more devices communicatively coupled to network 120.
Network file server or web server 180 represents a server configured to store and share meeting content. In one embodiment, meeting content may be stored on the calendaring software server 150. In another preferred embodiment, calendaring software server 150 is not utilized to store actual content from the meeting but instead stores a link (e.g., Universal Resource Locator, URL) pointing to a storage server (e.g., network fileserver or web server 180). In this preferred embodiment the calendaring software server 150 is off loaded of the responsibility for storing possibly voluminous meeting content and allowed to support its primary function of calendaring software support.
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After organizing the meeting, the organizer indicates a desire to send the invitation to all meeting invitees. Prior to being actually sent, the Outlook client being used by the organizer may collect or cause to be collected information that can be automatically included in the meeting invitation. The automatically included information may include information enabling participants to manually connect to the meeting if required (e.g., participants away from the office). After meeting invitations are actually sent, the organizer is able to receive accept/decline responses from all human participants, and possibly the conference room(s), virtual meeting rooms (VMR) on a video bridge, recording system, or other infrastructure resources. If necessary, the organizer can change the time or location of the meeting and send updates.
Next, at block 220 meeting invitees may optionally attach pre-meeting content to the calendar entry and thus provide easy access to this content either before or during the meeting. Pre-meeting content may include slide presentations, other office documents, meeting agenda, pre-recorded multimedia, and meeting preparation materials. At the scheduled time of the meeting, block 230, the meeting is initiated. As part of the initiation process, one or more programmable control devices communicatively coupled to the meeting scheduling software may retrieve information (block 240) from the meeting invitation and automatically dial into the video conference. Information retrieved may include dialing information, supported protocols, preferred equipment with scheduled capacity, etc. This information can be retrieved by infrastructure communicatively coupled to the scheduling software system. For example, an Exchange client program may be executing on a video system or a plug-in may be running on a PC configured as a video client. Also, end users and infrastructure resources such as physical conference rooms may be automatically connected or prompted with a confirmation message prior to joining the conference. If certain invited participants are outside the office, the participant can read connection information available in the meeting invitation and connect to the meeting via whatever means available at their current location. Invitations may also include calling links whereby invitees may join a conference by simply activating the link.
After initiation is complete, an optional message may be presented to the meeting organizer or to all participants. This optional message could, for example, disclose resources scheduled for the meeting but not currently in-use and people that were scheduled for the meeting but not currently present (i.e., not connected). Based on this information, the organizer may or may not decide to conduct the meeting with the available participants and resources. At block 250, it is determined if the meeting content (e.g., audio and/or video) should be recorded. If so, the YES prong of block 250, flow continues to block 260 where the calendar entry may be automatically updated with a copy of the recorded information or a link to the recorded information. Those of skill in the art will recognize that links may include but are not limited to, hyperlinks, icons or thumbnail representations indicating content corresponding to the meeting. If the meeting content was not recorded, the NO prong of block 250, flow continues directly to block 270. At block 270 the meeting has concluded and if necessary meeting invitees are notified that meeting materials are available. Flow then continues to block 280 where meeting participants may review the meeting information or unavailable meeting invitees (i.e., invitees that were not able to attend the actual meeting) can review meeting materials and replay any recorded content from the conference. A review of meeting materials may take place from several different types of devices, including but not limited to, individual computer workstations or other video conferencing devices equipped with an interface to the calendar scheduling software or an interface to email software.
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The middle layer (420) represents video conferencing devices. Endpoint devices can be registered to a call signaling server in the signaling and routing infrastructure. Again, multiple call routing infrastructures, running different protocols, may be present. Video bridge devices may be capable of having calls routed to them within each infrastructure. For example, the bridge may have a pool of video numbers (i.e., Virtual Meeting Rooms or VMRs) and each signaling infrastructure can be configured to route any calls destined for one of these numbers to the bridge.
The top layer (410) represents the scheduling/calendaring layer. For example, the top layer may consist of one or more Exchange Servers and Outlook clients operating within an organization which enable meeting organizers and participants to organize meetings and view/manage their calendars. Video conferencing devices which are part of the Video Calendaring enterprise may interact with this layer. One goal of this embodiment is to make it easier for meeting organizers and participants to schedule and use video conferencing in their meetings.
Each call signaling infrastructure (e.g., SIP and H.323) should be capable of routing calls dialed with the same address (e.g., 75333) to the same virtual meeting room (VMR). In addition, each video conferencing device should be capable of properly formatting the address and dialing it in the infrastructure to which that video conferencing device is connected. In the following example, numerical addresses are used, but URI addresses could also be used to develop a common dialing plan.
For numerical dialing, assume that some endpoint devices are connected to an H.323 gatekeeper infrastructure (440), while others are connected to a Microsoft OCS infrastructure (430). When an H.323-connected endpoint extracts the VMR address (e.g., 75333) from the meeting invitation (in this embodiment), the H.323-connected endpoint simply needs to use 75333 as the destination address in the H.225 Setup message (as it normally does). This address can be resolved by the gatekeeper. The gatekeeper should be configured to route all VMR numbers to one or more appropriate bridges. For the OCS infrastructure, endpoints can set the SIP URI of the Request URI header with the phone number and a phone-context of the phone number in the user part of the SIP URI (as defined in RFC3966).
Again, a single number, or URI, can be inserted into a calendar invitation and the number, or URI, can be extracted by equipment running under different protocols and used to dial into the same conference. Thus video conferencing devices running under different protocols in the same environment can be used to join the same meetings. Users do not need to be aware that their equipment is using different protocols and video conferencing infrastructures can be easily migrated from one protocol to another over time. For example, instead of being required to upgrade all older H.323-based equipment to SIP based equipment, a company can start deploying SIP for new equipment and keep using older H.323 equipment and infrastructure, yet their users will easily be able to join the same video conferences.
In one embodiment of a Video Calendaring system according to this disclosure, each participant (meeting invitee) or host in a video meeting (e.g., either a video conferencing system or a virtual meeting room) may be closely coupled to a Calendar system (e.g., Exchange) mailbox. Two types of mailboxes may be defined: 1) personal mailboxes which typically belong to a person, and 2) resource mailboxes which can belong to a room or a piece of equipment etc. In one embodiment of Video Calendaring, the video conferencing system or VMR contains an Exchange client which performs actions on behalf of the mailbox to which it is coupled. Additionally, there are two example modes in which a video system's Exchange client can operate:
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To support the scenario of timeline 700, the bridge supporting the VMRs may run an Exchange client which is “associated” with a mailbox which has been configured in Exchange specifically for supporting VMRs. This means that the VMR Exchange client can be aware of the calendar schedule for all of the meetings on the bridge.
When a meeting organizer decides to include video conferencing in his meeting, the Outlook add-in can automatically insert the user's VMR video number into the message body of the invitation. The meeting invitation can also include a “callto” link to the VMR host. The meeting organizer can also choose to record the meeting by checking a box, and that information can also be inserted into the invitation. If the meeting is being recorded, the VMR can automatically connect to the recording device.
When an organizer schedules a meeting using video, the following information can be inserted into the meeting invitation by an Outlook add-in:
Exchange Server can be provisioned with at least one mailbox for VMRs. It is this mailbox that the Outlook add-in can add to the participant list when a meeting is scheduled for a VMR. This is also the mailbox whose calendar the VMR Exchange client can monitor. Note that more than one VMR mailbox can be provisioned. The Outlook add-in should add the VMR mailbox to the participant list, so that the meeting can appear in the VMR mailbox calendar.
An automated mechanism can be used to provide this information. Each Exchange mailbox has, for example, fifteen custom read/write attributes. One, or more, of these attributes can be configured to contain the information for each user. A management application (e.g., Polycom Distributed Media Application (DMA)), can configure user mailboxes with this information. Because a user's VMR number is relatively static, the add-in may also store it in the PC's registry so that it can be available if the connection to Exchange is not available
Video conferencing endpoints may enable users to access the calendar for the device. In the case of a personal system, the system displays the user's calendar. In the case of a conference room device, the system displays the room's calendar (with possibly suppressed private information as described below). Icons may be used to designate that a meeting includes video conferencing.
Video conferencing devices may also notify their users of upcoming meetings. If the video conferencing device is not in use, the notification can take up most of the display as in
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Program control device 1010 may be included in a conferencing device and be programmed to perform methods in accordance with this disclosure (e.g., those illustrated in
Aspects of the invention are described as a method of control or manipulation of data, and may be implemented in one or a combination of hardware, firmware, and software. Embodiments of the invention may also be implemented as instructions stored on a machine-readable medium, which may be read and executed by at least one processor to perform the operations described herein. A machine-readable medium may include any mechanism for tangibly embodying information in a form readable by a machine (e.g., a computer). For example, a machine-readable medium (sometimes referred to as a program storage device or a computer readable medium) may include read-only memory (ROM), random-access memory (RAM), magnetic disc storage media, optical storage media, flash-memory devices, electrical, optical, and others.
Various changes in the details of the illustrated operational methods are possible without departing from the scope of the following claims. For instance, illustrative flow chart steps of
It is to be understood that the above description is intended to be illustrative, and not restrictive. For example, the above-described embodiments may be used in combination with each other. Many other embodiments will be apparent to those of skill in the art upon reviewing the above description. The scope of the invention should, therefore, be determined with reference to the appended claims, along with the full scope of equivalents to which such claims are entitled. In the appended claims, the terms “including” and “in which” are used as the plain-English equivalents of the respective terms “comprising” and “wherein.”
This disclosure is a divisional application of copending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/965,105 filed on 10 Dec. 2010 and claims priority to that application and to U.S. Provisional Patent Application Ser. No. 61/298,604 entitled “Extended Video Conferencing Features through Electronic Calendaring” filed 27 Jan. 2010 by Michael Tucker et al., each of which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety. This disclosure is also related to subject matter disclosed in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/542,331, entitled “Archiving Content in a Calendared Event,” filed 17 Aug. 2009 by Stephen Schaefer et al., which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety.
Number | Date | Country | |
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61298604 | Jan 2010 | US |
Number | Date | Country | |
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Parent | 12965105 | Dec 2010 | US |
Child | 13872782 | US |