Conferencing Services

Cronofy’s conferencing integrations are designed to make it simple to add video and dial-in details to events created through the Cronofy API, and keep these conferences in sync with the event.

The goals of this feature are to:

1. create an experience that closely mimics the user adding a details to their own events.
2. make it as simple as possible for our customers to implement.

Zero config #

The simplest way to take advantage of this is to just add the following conferencing value to any events that you create:

{
  "event_id": "qTtZdczOccgaPncGJaCiLg",
  "summary": "Board meeting",
  "description": "Discuss plans for the next quarter.",
  "start": "2023-10-02T15:30:00Z",
  "end": "2023-10-02T17:00:00Z",
  "tzid": "America/Chicago",
  "conferencing": {
    "profile_id": "default"
  }
}

Without any setup this will do one of two things.

For example, if the calendar provider is Google or Office365 and the calendar has Google Meet or Teams enabled, conferencing details will automatically be added to the event.

Otherwise, through a partnership with 8x8, we generate a unique video conference link for each event and the details are added.

This provides a simple way for all of your user’s to get access to video conferencing with minimal code changes in your app.

More info in the Conferencing Services API Reference.

Please note: to disable MS Teams as a conferencing service for Office365, a simple license revoking is not going to prevent user from creating events with Teams links. Please see our FAQ page on disabling Teams as an integrated conferencing for instructions on how this can be done.

With the user’s own conferencing service #

Users do have their own conferencing accounts so we’ve provided a way to allow your users to authorize their Zoom, GoToMeeting, etc accounts. Then, when you request conferencing is added to an event created in that user’s calendar, Cronofy will generate a meeting link using that account.

Rather than just using a common link to a personal meeting room or similar, this will provision a unique meeting just for that event. As part of this we use sensible defaults for security, eg passcodes, and/or inherit the meeting policies from the organization.

It also gives them access to the recording capabilities and controls that they would expect if they used the conferencing account directly.

The authorization is managed by Cronofy in a two step process.

1. You make an API call to request an Authorization URL for the user.
2. You redirect the user to the URL we provide and they’ll be presented with a similar authorization process to the calendar auth flow, again branded for your application.

Once they’ve authorized they are taken back to your application.

Next time you request that conferencing is added to an event with the default profile, we’ll use the user’s account to do that.

More info on authorization in the Conferencing Services API Reference.

With your conferencing service #

You can also pass the conferencing details in explicitly if you are hosting the video service or what more control over the conferencing integration.

{
  "event_id": "qTtZdczOccgaPncGJaCiLg",
  "summary": "Coaching session",
  "start": "2023-10-02T15:30:00Z",
  "end": "2023-10-02T17:00:00Z",
  "tzid": "America/Chicago",
  "conferencing": {
    "profile_id": "explicit",
    "provider_description", "Your App",
    "join_url": "https://yourapp.example.com/video/12345"
  }
}

More info in the Conferencing Services API Reference.