topic Re: Terminating an ongoing Webex call in Cloud Collaboration

Terminating an ongoing Webex call

Anubis1 — Sat, 12 Mar 2022 15:53:13 GMT

Hello everyone,

My company is planning to integrate a video conferencing service into one of our apps. We expect the following primary features from the video conferencing platform.

ability to create a video conference between two parties from the backend
ability to terminate an ongoing meeting
ability to get a detailed report of participants (e.g. when did each participant joined/left, including rejoins)

I am currently eveluating the webex REST API using a free webex account. Eventhough the API seems to be very rich it doesn't provide APIs for ongoing call termination and for getting a detailed report. Existing meeting delete API doesn't allow deleting an ongoing meeting. Also the existing get meeting participant details API doesn't provide details of multiple rejoins, it only has the last joined/left time of the participant.

I have read in some of the old posts here about URL API and XML API (deprecated) which are claimed to have these capabilities. However I didn't manage to test any of these APIs using my free account.

Following are the questions I am having at the moment.

Does Webex have an API which provides all the above capabilities? if so, where can I find concrete information about testing them using a free account.
Or, is the free account limited? does a paid account contain these features? if so, which kind of a paid account should I get. I see there are different plans
Or, is Webex not suitable for this kind of an application? any recommendations?

Re: Terminating an ongoing Webex call

dstaudt — Mon, 14 Mar 2022 18:32:36 GMT

In general, as you've found, the Webex meetings REST APIs are focused on static configuration and schedule management - not real-time meeting management.

The Webex Browser SDK does provide all those real-time interaction features (starting/ending meetings, getting participant join events, etc.), however it is designed to run in a web browser as a 1st party meeting client; therefore not amenable as a service-based 3rd-party call control solution. If (at least one of) the participants are joining the meeting via web apps you've build using this SDK, then you should be able to control things as you need, from the client-side. If they're joining through something else (the regular Webex browser experience, the mobile Webex app, etc.) then that might be less feasible...

If feature requirements are simple - i.e. just users voice/video conferencing, no extended Webex features e.g. whiteboarding, chat, etc. - then it might be worth considering something like Broadworks (which also has browser-based SDKs.) Webex Calling (based on Broadworks, I believe) has simple 3rd party call control REST APIs, but I don't see conferencing APIs currently: https://developer.webex.com/docs/webex-calling

Re: Terminating an ongoing Webex call

dstaudt — Mon, 14 Mar 2022 18:34:05 GMT

BTW, I'd encourage you to get a second opinion via the dedicated Webex developer support channels available here: https://developer.webex.com/support