Real-time group communications involve many building blocks to bring functionalities like calls, chats or video conferencing. In an open world, relying on a single actor to supply all the technology required for such services to be live is not recommended.
Video conferencing servers are key components that need to be integrated in full-scale digital workplaces. Functions such as conference scheduling or participant management need to be tightly linked with calendars or address books.
The Linphone’s team has developed an open source video conferencing server that can be controlled following RFC6503, an open standard designed “to create, manipulate, and delete conference objects”. Therefore, there is no need for proprietary code to integrate conferencing management into a wider system.
As an illustration of the matter XCON CCMP intends to solve, this talk begins with an introduction to existing conferencing servers (Jitsi, Zoom, Teams, etc.) and their specific controlling APIs. Next, a quick introduction to this protocol. Then, we present an implementation made by the Linphone team in the Flexisip SIP conferencing server and how to control it from a third-party component. Finally, we conclude this talk by emphasis how open standards improve the resilience of complex solutions based on heterogeneous building blocks.