Online Meetings Overview

This feature is only available in SmarterMail Enterprise.

While live chat is a great resource, it's only available to coworkers and others who share your same domain. In addition, its focus is text messaging, with some audio and video capabilities. For those times when you need to invite other people -- contract workers, consultants or even clients -- into the conversation, and focus on using video chat, there's SmarterMail's Online Meetings.

Online meetings include real-time audio and video chat, inline group chat, and document sharing. NOTE: While any number of participants can be invited to an online meeting, audio and video chat is handled via a peer-to-peer system, so it's limited to up to 9 concurrent users. However, an unlimited number of people can use the group text chat during a meeting. NOTE: If the domain administrator has set up an external STUN/TURN server, the max number of participants increases to 16.

A SmarterMail online meeting is a great way to gather people together. There's no software to download, no services to sign up for and meetings are both desktop and mobile friendly! (As long as your mobile browser supports WebRTC.)

In addition, online meetings can be set up and scheduled from within SmarterMail's powerful calendaring system. When creating a meeting invitation -- whether it's a one-time meeting or a recurring appointment -- a new online meeting can ALSO be created and the link is included with the invitation when it's sent out.

NOTE: In order to use online meetings your SmarterMail installation MUST be secured with an SSL certificate. This is because the audio, video and live chat connections require HTTPs connections in order to work properly and securely.

A Note About Various Privacy and Security Settings

It's worth mentioning that some browsers, by default, may block or otherwise inhibit connecting to an Online Meeting. Apart from allowing the use of your camera and audio devices, some browsers have additional Privacy settings that may interrupt, delay, or otherwise interfere with how Online Meetings function. For example, the Brave browser, known for its increased focus on protecting private information, has a specific Privacy and Security setting for WebRTC. In our testing, we've found that changing this setting to Default Public and Private Interfaces or Default Public Interface Only will not interfere with Online Meetings, meaning that audio and video will work as expected. Other browsers may have similar settings that need to be configured, edited, or changed in order to ensure Online Meetings will work for participants.

In addition, your operating system may have internal firewall or network settings that can inhibit the performance of Online Meetings. For example, MacOS Sequoia has "local network" settings that, if not enabled for your browser, can cause issues with audio and video in Online Meetings. This can be checked by opening Settings and going to Privacy & Security > Local Network and ensuring that the browser you're using has Local Network access enabled.

Creating an Online Meeting

When creating a new online meeting you'll be presented with this:

Title your meeting and you're ready to get started as the meeting's title is all that is actually required to save the meeting. However, there are a few other settings you can add on the creation screen: you can add a password and/or you can schedule the online meeting so that it will be used on a regular basis. Once you click the Save button, you can either stop there or open the meeting and further customize your settings.

Complete Settings

After you create your meeting, you can open it and modify its settings. As an aside, you can edit these settings at any time by clicking on the Settings (gear) icon whenever you open your meeting. Below is what the settings page looks like:

Just as with other areas of SmarterMail, the settings for an online meeting include various cards for categorization. The cards, and their respective settings, include:

Details

• Title - This will be whatever you called the online meeting when it was initially set up, but you can change it at any time.
• Secure with a password - If you want to lock access to the meeting with a password, that's not a problem. Simply set the password here to whatever you want. When sending out the invitation, however, be sure to let your participants know the password or they won't be able to join.
• Allow guest users - Don't want to force your attendees to log in? No problem! Just enable "Allow guest users" and anyone with the link can attend the meeting, no log in required.
• Allow attendees to start the meeting - Enabled by default, this means attendees can start the meeting without the Organizer to be present.

Security

• Waiting Room - Waiting rooms allow organizers to specify which attendees should wait to be admitted into an Online Meeting. No one, Guests, or Everyone can be subject to waiting. When a new attendee "joins", a modal appears announcing they're waiting to be admitted into the meeting.
• File upload permissions - Each meeting has the ability to allow users to upload files. However, the meeting organizer can set file upload permissions so that only the organizer has upload permissions, people who are authenticated users can upload files, or anyone can upload. NOTE: - It IS possible to restrict the file extensions that are able to be uploaded to an online meeting. However, the File Storage Extension Blacklist is set by the system administrator.
• Mute Others - Organizers can pick which type of attendee has the ability to mute other Online Meeting participants. While users may be allowed to mute other participants, they do not have the ability to un-mute participants. They must un-mute themselves.

Date and Time

• Scheduled Meeting - Toggle Scheduled Meeting if you want to continue using the same online meeting on a regular basis. This is similar to creating recurring Calendar appointments where you set the state date and time as well as the ending date and time. NOTE: When an Online Meeting is created as part of a standard SmarterMail Calendar appointment, these will be set to mirror the date(s) and time(s) associated with the Appointment.
• End Behavior - At the end of the scheduled recurrence, you have options to Archive Meeting, which ends the schedule but keeps the meeting in your list, Delete Meeting, or Keep Active.

Video Settings

NOTE: Some browsers, such as Safari on MacOS, default some audio/video settings. As a result, attendees may not have the ability to edit these settings.

• Webcam - This is the stream quality for your online meeting. Video can take up a lot of bandwidth, so keeping this set to Low is a "best practice" if at all possible.
• Microphone - This allows you to set the default microphone you use during the meeting. This will generally default to whichever default input device is set for your computer, but you can change it to headphones, an attached USB mic or any other input device you have set up.
• Speakers - Just as with the microphone setting, this is the audio output for the meeting. Again, this will generally default to whichever default output device is set up for your computer, but you can change it to whatever.

Several advanced audio controls are also available:

• Automatic volume controls - Enabling this allows SmarterMail to automatically handle increasing or decreasing the volume of the meeting.
• Echo cancellation - Enabling this allows SmarterMail to automatically handle echo managment.
• Reduce background noise - Enabling this allows SmarterMail to automatically handle reducing any background noise that may be picked up by the microphone selected.

Meeting Link

• Meeting Link - This is the link to the meeting that can be shared with whoever you want to attend. You can select the text and copy it, or use the copy icon.

File Storage

This section will initially be empty. However, as you use the meeting, it will keep track of the number of files shared in the meeting and the space taken up by those files.

Chat

While chat is a great feature of online meetings, it may be necessary to delete the chat. For example, if the same meeting is used on a weekly or monthly basis for a meeting, you may want to delete the live chats after whatever information in the chat was transcribed to a separate document, once tasks have been created from action items, etc. This area allows you to delete all of the live chats that have occurred during the meeting.

Once you have all your settings in place, be sure to save them. As an aside, if you need to change a setting, like allowing guests to upload images, you can change that during the meeting and the setting takes effect immediately.

Online Meetings and Calendar Invites

When creating a meeting invitation in your calendar, you have the option to "Create Online Meeting". This setting allows organizers to have a new online meeting created, automatically, to be used for the appointment that's being set up. The meeting will use the appointment's Subject as its name and will appear in the Online Meetings area. In addition, a link to the meeting is sent with the meeting invitation to all attendees. By default, meetings are initially created to allow for guest users, do not have passwords assigned, and are set so that only the Organizer can upload files. Therefore, if any of these settings need to be changed, they'll need to be changed prior to the meeting date/time, and any changes manually sent to the attendees. NOTE: If an appointment that has an online meeting associated to it is cancelled or otherwise deleted, the online meeting is not deleted immediately. Instead, SmarterMail runs a nightly routine that will remove online meetings associated with deleted/cancelled appointments.

Access Previous Meetings

Any meeting room you create are saved as a separate cards. That means you can access, and re-access, any past meetings. While the video isn't saved, any live chats and shared documents ARE saved, allowing you to refer back to those at a later date whenever needed.

Participated Meetings

Not only are the meetings that YOU create listed, so are meetings that you've been invited to. To access these, simply click on the Participated Meetings option from the left navigation pane. Here, meetings that you've participated in are listed as separate cards. While you won't be able to edit any information on these cards, you do have the ability to revisit the meetings, see chats, re-login to the video chat and more.

Sharing Online Meeting URLs

The URL for an online meeting can be accessed in two locations:

• Using the Actions (⋮) menu on a meeting's card -- simply click on the menu and select "Copy" from the dropdown. (An online meeting can be deleted from here as well.)
• By opening the actual meeting and copying the URL from its settings.

The first method is, by far, faster and more convenient. It allows you to quickly grab a URL and share it in a live chat, in an email or when creating a single or recurring appointment.