What's new in version 21?

VMR Scheduling for Exchange deployments using Office 365 now have the option to authenticate the service account using OAuth 2.0 (rather than Basic Authentication).

As of October 2020, Microsoft will stop supporting and fully decommission Basic Authentication for EWS to access Exchange Online (for more information, see Microsoft's announcement). We therefore strongly recommend that for Office 365, all new deployments authenticate the service account using OAuth 2.0, and all existing deployments are updated to enable this option as soon as possible.

Note that this change does not affect Exchange on-premises.

Enabling OAuth authentication

Configuring dynamic bursting to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

When integrating Microsoft Teams with Pexip Infinity:

• If a Microsoft Teams conference is recorded, audio prompts indicating that recording has been started/stopped are played to callers who are gatewayed via Pexip Infinity into the conference, and a recording indicator is displayed.

• You can use Pexip Infinity as an external RTMP encoder for your Teams live events, which means that you can stream video, audio and presentation content from your videoconferencing meeting room systems directly into the event.

• The TLS client certificate chain verification process now handles intermediate certificates that are not in the Windows Certificate Store.
• Improved live view in the Pexip Infinity Administrator interface.
• New installation script variables to control when Windows updates are applied to the Teams Connector instances, and to provide consent for Azure resource usage tracking.
• Improved tenant administrator consent process. Note that the URL structure of the app consent page has changed (only relevant to new deployments).

• The Teams Connector supports connections over TLSv1.2 only, and does not support RC2, RC4, DES and 3DES ciphers.

Integrating Microsoft Teams with Pexip Infinity

You can now deploy Conferencing Nodes in Microsoft Azure across peered regions (Global VNet Peering). Previously this was only possible via a VNet-to-VNet VPN gateway connection.

Note that if you are upgrading to version 21, you must not delete the VPN gateway until after you have upgraded. You can then delete the gateway and enable VNet peering.

Deploying Pexip Infinity on Microsoft Azure

Deploying Pexip Infinity on Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Configuring existing Conferencing Nodes

You can configure Pexip Infinity to push conference and participant-related events to an external service (System > Event Sinks).

This mechanism can be used in large deployments as an alternative to making frequent calls to the management status API, in order to reduce the load on the Management Node.

Each event sink can be assigned to one or more system locations.

This release contains the following administrative improvements:

• Live view updates: the summary now includes the number of external conferences; the external conference tooltip lists all participants (not just external users); Teams Connectors that are currently handling calls are now represented; and locked conferences are now indicated by (previously ).

Viewing live and historical platform status

• When downloading a certificate from the Management Node you have the option to include intermediate certificates.

• When configuring an LDAP synchronization template, there is a new multi_valued_attrs variable that will contain all of the LDAP fields that are found to have multiple values for a given user. Also, there is a corresponding new pex_find_first_match filter that can be used to extract values from the multi_valued_attrs variable.

• The security wizard contains two new options to specify the CCA-ID and the Resource-Priority prefix to use in the SIP Contact header. Also, the option to enable management web validation of host headers has been removed as this is now enabled automatically if the new Management Node FQDN field is configured.

• A new client REST API command /api/client/v2/status can be used to allow load balancers to detect whether a Conferencing Node is in maintenance mode.

• A new client REST API command /api/client/v2/conferences/<conference_alias>/transform_layout can be used to change the conference layout on-the-fly, and enable/disable indicators and overlay text.

• Conferencing Node status details now includes a call count of the number of signaling connections that the node is currently handling.

• A service configuration response field of bypass_proxy is available to local and external policy. This can be used to bypass a Proxying Edge Node and send media directly to a Transcoding Conferencing Node.

• The VMR Scheduling for Exchange service now writes events to the administrator log, and there is a new template for configuring the general error message seen by users.

Log output

Reject general error template

• Conferencing Nodes are now referenced in the Administrator interface using both their IP address and their name.

• When downloading a limited duration diagnostic snapshot, there is now an option to include metrics from all Conferencing Nodes (in addition to the metrics from the Management Node).

• Errors and warnings in the support and administrator logs are now shown with a highlighted background for emphasis.

About the administrator log

About the support log

VP9 is now available for connections to Conferencing Nodes running the AVX2 or later instruction set. It will be disabled by default for both new and upgraded deployments, but can be enabled by including it in the list of Chosen Codecs.

VP9 uses around one third less bandwidth for the same resolution when compared to VP8. Note however that VP9 calls consume around 1.5 times the CPU resource (ports) on the Conferencing Node.

Codecs

Call types and resource requirements

There is an improved method of constructing a suitable alias to use as the "From" address (so as to provide a suitable call back address) when placing the outbound leg of a gateway call when no suitable "From" address already exists.

Note that this does not apply for gateway calls to or from a Skype for Business / Lync meeting. For these calls, if the original source alias is not a valid SIP alias it will no longer be appended to the display name.

When handling registration requests over HTTPS (from Infinity Connect clients):

• Failed registration requests are now recorded in the support log. The log entries contain the message "REST device authentication failed".
• Registration requests that are sent to a Conferencing Node that is in maintenance mode are now rejected with "503 Service Unavailable" instead of "404 Not Found".

This release contains the following administrative modifications:

• When activating license requests, the Management Node may attempt to contact the Pexip licensing server at either pexip.flexnetoperations.com (existing address) or activation.pexip.com (new address). Either server address may be used depending on the type of activation key supplied.

• In the Administrator interface the existing Status menu now only contains options to view the current status of the Pexip Infinity platform and any conference instances currently in progress. A new History & Logs top-level menu contains options to view the historical status of completed conferences, alarms, system usage, logs and so on. Also, the System configuration, Platform configuration and Service configuration top-level menu items are now called System, Platform and Services respectively.

• On the Platform > Global settings page, each group of settings (connectivity, port ranges, security and so on) is now contracted by default. Individual sections can be shown (expanded) or hidden (contracted), or you can expand or collapse all sections.

• Search functionality has been added to relevant pages within the Administrator interface.

• Any "out of resource" messages in the administrator log now state either "out of proxying resource" or "out of transcoding resource" as appropriate.

• The jinja2 truncate filter has changed its behavior. Previously, the length parameter did not include the length of the ellipsis (or other indicator) inserted at the end of a truncated string. Now, it does.

  For example, given a filter such as:

  {{ "string" | truncate(4) }}

  the previous version would emit:

  "stri..."

  The new version will emit:

  "s..."

Previously, in order to keep a conference alive when only Guests remained, a Host must have either joined with audio or video, or joined as a presentation and control-only participant and elected to Start conference. Other presentation and control-only Hosts did not keep the conference alive.

Now, the presence of a Host who has joined as presentation and control-only will prevent the conference from being automatically terminated.

Any Automatically Dialed Participants and manually-invited participants who have been given a role of Host now join a locked conference immediately, regardless of whether the conference has a Host or Guest PIN or no PINs at all. Previously, an invited participant with a role of Host would be held at the Waiting for the host screen if the conference did not have a Host PIN.

As of Pexip Infinity v12, the SSE4.x instruction set was only supported in deployments that had upgraded from a previous version — SSE4.x was not supported in new deployments using v12 or later.

As of 1 January 2020, SSE4.x will not be supported at all. Before this date you must ensure that all Conferencing Nodes in your deployment are relocated to hardware using the AVX or later instruction set. Please contact your Pexip authorized support representative if this may not be achievable.

To check the instruction set for each Conferencing Node, go to Status > Conferencing Nodes, select the Conferencing Node and scroll down to CPU instruction set.

The Pexip branding portal contains several new features:

• A new Custom Builds section that allows you to create your own stand-alone next-generation desktop client packages for Windows, macOS and Linux. It will build a package for you with your selected customizations and associated language packs, and you can then download an installer image from the portal for local distribution.
• A new resources panel in the Splash Screens editor allows you to manage background screens and icons. You can now apply the same background for all splash screens, or apply different backgrounds to individual screens.
• You can select which version of Pexip Infinity you have installed, so that the relevant branding and customization features can be offered.

https://brandingportal.pexip.com

New customization features are available. You can:

• Enable a landing page that displays a customizable image/logo and welcome text.
• Customize the favicon used by the web app.

If you currently use customized branding in your web app, then after upgrading to version 21 you will lose the default Pexip favicon (). To resolve this you must either manually add the necessary favicons to your branding package and re-upload it, or if you use the Pexip branding portal you can create and upload a new version 21 branding package which will automatically include the relevant favicon files.

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