Managing Support for On-Premise Web Conferencing Meetings

Configuring Meeting Policies

If your Office Communications Server 2007 deployment includes servers or Enterprise pools that are configured for Web conferencing, any user who is enabled for Office Communications Server 2007 can join a meeting. If enabled for Web conferencing, a user can organize a meeting and invite internal participants or federated users. Additionally, you can configure Office Communications Server 2007 to permit users to invite anonymous participants. Anonymous participants are external users that do not belong to your organization or a federated partner. For example, you may want to invite a vendor to participate in an internal meeting. In this case, a user could send this vendor an invitation to the meeting and, when this vendor joined the meeting, the user's identity would be verified through a meeting key. To invite an anonymous participant to a meeting, however, the account of the user who organizes the meeting must be configured with the necessary permissions. You have the following configuration options for anonymous participation:

• Give permission at the global level to invite anonymous participants to meetings, in which case all users in an Active Directory forest can invite anonymous participants to meetings.

• Deny permission to all users at the global level, in which case no users in the forest can invite anonymous participants to meetings.

• Enforce a meeting policy per user, in which case only individual user accounts configured to allow anonymous participation can invite anonymous participants. For information and procedures for configuring a user account to work with per user settings, see the Allowing or Disallowing Invitation of Anonymous Participants to Meetings by Individual Users section of this guide, in Configuring Individual Office Communications Server User Account Properties.

To support anonymous participation in meetings, you must also configure edge server support to allow anonymous users to connect to your network. For information about configuring edge servers to support anonymous participation in meetings, see the Enabling and Configuring Anonymous Participation in Meetings section of this guide, in Managing Connectivity between Internal Servers and Edge Servers.

Meeting features, except anonymous participation, are grouped and managed using meeting policies. You control which meeting features a meeting organizer can use during a meeting by configuring and applying specific policies. The meeting organizers meeting policy controls the meeting and applies to all meeting participants, not the meeting policy of the participant. For example, Bob is configured with a meeting policy that has IP audio enabled and Sue is configured with a default meeting policy that has IP audio disabled. As an attendee of Bob's meeting, Sue can use IP audio because the meeting uses Bob's meeting policy. However, when Sue organizes a meeting, all attendees of her meeting use her meeting policy, so no IP audio is available for the meeting. For information about configuring meeting policies for individual users, see the Configuring the Meeting Policy for Individual Users section of this guide, in Configuring Individual Office Communications Server User Account Properties.

By default, Office Communications Server 2007 has five meeting policy definitions. All meeting policies include the same features, but any or all of the features can be configured differently for each meeting policy. Table 7 shows the policy settings that you configure for each policy to manage features.

Table 7. Policy settings for meetings

Each meeting policy defined at the global level is available for use across the forest. By default, the following policies are defined for Office Communications Server 2007:

• Default Policy. This is the default meeting policy configured at the forest level.

• Policy 1 (High). This is the policy of the same name configured at the forest level. By default, this policy grants the highest level of access to meeting features when compared to the other default policies.

• Policy 2 (Medium High). This is the policy of the same name configured at the forest level.

• Policy 4 (Medium Low). This is the policy of the same name configured at the forest level.

• Policy 5 (Low). This is the policy of the same name configured at the forest level. By default, this policy grants the lowest level of access to meeting features when compared to the other default policies.

You can use these meeting policies, define one or more new meeting policies, change the policy definition for any global meeting policy, and delete any policy except the default policy.

Use the procedures in this section to do the following:

• Create a global meeting policy.

• Modify or remove a global meeting policy.

• Select the meeting policy for your organization.

To create a global meeting policy

1. Open Office Communications Server 2007.

2. In the console tree, right-click Forest, click Properties, and then click Global Properties.

3. Click the Meetings tab.

   

4. In Policy settings, under the Policy Definition list, click Add.

   

5. In the Policy name box, type a name for the policy.

6. Specify the settings you want in this policy to control the level of access to meeting features granted to users.

To modify or remove a global meeting policy

1. Open Office Communications Server 2007.

2. In the console tree, right-click Forest, click Properties, and then click Global Properties.

3. On the Meetings tab, click the individual policy definition (meeting policy) you want to modify or remove, and then do one of the following:

   • To view or modify a policy definition to control the level of access to meeting features granted to users, In the Policy Definition list, click the name of the policy, and then click Edit. In the Edit Policy dialog box, change any settings, as appropriate.

   • To remove a policy definition, click Remove.

To apply a global meeting policy

1. Open Office Communications Server 2007.

2. In the console tree, right-click Forest, click Properties, and then click Global Properties.

3. Click the Meetings tab.

   

4. In Policy settings, in the Global Policy drop-down list box, do one of the following:

   • To use a single global policy for the entire organization, click the name of the specific policy in the drop-down list. If an appropriate policy does not exist in the list, use the procedure earlier in this section to create it.

   • To apply meeting policies on a per-user basis, click Use per user policy in the drop-down list. You then specify the policy for individual users, as described in the Configuring the Meeting Policy for Individual Users section of this guide, in Configuring Individual Office Communications Server User Account Properties.

Changing the UNC Paths Where Meeting Content or Metadata Is Stored

The Web Conferencing Server in Office Communications Server 2007 saves any content created in a conference to a folder. Along with the content, the Web Conferencing Server also saves metadata information to a folder. The metadata information describes the meeting content such as upload time and user who uploaded the content. Both the meeting content and the metadata are encrypted.

The location for the meeting content folder and the meeting metadata folder are specified during setup and cannot be changed using Office Communications Server 2007. However, those locations can be changed after Office Communications Server is deployed by using the manual steps described in the following sections.

Manually changing the folder location for meeting content and metadata requires completing the following steps:

1. Stopping the Office Communications Server Web Conferencing service.

2. Creating and configuring the file folders and file shares for meeting content and metadata.

3. Changing WMI settings for meeting content and meeting content metadata folders.

4. Changing the IIS virtual directory to the presentation folder.

5. Restarting the Office Communications Server Web Conferencing service.

Configuring Meeting Invitation URLs

When a user is invited to a meeting, the user receives a meeting invitation through the Microsoft Office Outlook® messaging and collaboration client. The meeting invitation contains a URL to join the meeting. Additionally, if you have configured Office Communications Server 2007 to support meetings for both internal and external users, the following URLs are available to meeting attendees:

• Meeting client download URL. This is a link for users to download and install the Live Meeting 2007 client. You can only change the internal meeting client download URL, not the external client download URL.

• Support page URLs. By default, both the internal and external URLs link to a Microsoft support page (https://r.office.microsoft.com/r/rlidLiveMeeting?p1=12&p2=en_us&p3=LMInfo&p4=supportserver), but you can host your own support page on your own Web server.

Use the procedures in this section to do the following:

• Specify a URL for downloading the Live Meeting 2007 Client.

• Host the support page on a Web server and specify the support URL

Specifying the Organization Name for Meeting Invitations

You can also change the name of the organization that appears in the meeting e-mail invitation. This name is sent to the Microsoft Office Live Meeting add-in for Microsoft Office Outlook for use in meeting invitations sent by users in this pool.

Configuring the Maximum Scheduled Meetings Allowed Per User

Use the following procedure to customize the maximum number of meetings that a user is permitted to schedule at one time.

Managing Meeting Life Cycles

Meeting life cycles are controlled by the following processes:

• Deactivation. Deactivating a meeting ends the instance of the meeting, but the meeting continues to exist in the database and can be reactivated and rejoined.

• Expiration. When the expiration time is reached, the meeting and all associated meeting content are deleted from the database. The default expiration time is 14 days.

Meeting deactivation and expiration are primarily automatic processes in Office Communications Server 2007. However, there are three WMI settings that the administrator can use to modify the meeting deactivation and expiration processes.

For conference deactivation, there are two pool-level WMI settings that are stored as properties in the MSFT_SIPMeetingScheduleSetting WMI class in the root\CIMV2 namespace, as described in Table 12.

Table 12. MSFT_SIPMeetingScheduleSetting WMI class in the root\CIMV2 namespace

For conference expiration, there is one pool-level WMI setting that is stored as a property in the MSFT_SIPDataMCUCapabilitySetting WMI class in the root\CIMV2 namespace, as described in Table 13.

Table 13. MSFT_SIPDataMCUCapabilitySetting WMI class in the root\CIMV2 namespace

Use Windows Management Instrumentation Tester (WBEMTest) and the following procedure to modify deactivation and expiration WMI settings.