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Bulk import / export of basic Virtual Meeting Room or Virtual Auditorium configuration

If you want to configure your Pexip Infinity platform with a large number of Virtual Meeting Rooms and Virtual Auditoriums, you can import the configuration for those services from a CSV file.

This feature allows you to import basic configuration only. It does not allow you to import the configuration for the themes, Automatically Dialed Participants or bandwidth limitations that are associated with each service. When importing Virtual Auditoriums, the default Host view and Guest view are used.

You can import Virtual Meeting Rooms from directory information contained in a Windows Active Directory LDAP server, or any other LDAP-accessible database. For more information, see Provisioning VMRs and devices from Active Directory via LDAP.

You can also export all of your existing Virtual Meeting Room or Virtual Auditorium configuration data to a CSV file. You may want to do this for backup purposes or to transfer configuration between, for example, a test system and a production system.

Preparing the CSV file for import

Format

The data in the CSV file must use the following format:

name,description,pin,allow_guests,guest_pin,alias_alias,alias_description

where:

name The name used to refer to this Virtual Meeting Room or Virtual Auditorium.
description An optional description of the Virtual Meeting Room or Virtual Auditorium.
pin

This optional field allows you to set a secure access code that must be entered by participants before they can join the conference.

If a Guest PIN has also been set, then the PIN will apply to the conference Host(s) only.

For more information, see About PINs, Hosts and Guests.

  • PINs must use the digits 0-9 only.
  • PINs may optionally end with #.
  • PINs must be between 4–20 digits long, including any #.
allow_guests

Determines whether the conference will allow participants with Guest privileges.

True: the conference will have two types of participants: Hosts and Guests. You must also include a pin to be used by the Hosts. You can optionally enter a guest_pin; if you do not enter a guest_pin, Guests can join without a PIN, but the meeting will not start until the first Host has joined.

False: all participants will have the same Host privileges.

If this field is left blank it will default to False.

guest_pin

This optional field allows you to set a secure access code that must be entered by Guests before they can join the conference.

For more information, see About PINs, Hosts and Guests.

  • Host PINs and Guest PINs must be different.
  • PINs must use the digits 0-9 only.
  • PINs may optionally end with #.
  • PINs must be between 4–20 digits long, including any #.
  • If the Host PIN ends in # and a Guest PIN is used, the Guest PIN must also end with #.
  • If # is not used, Host PINs and Guest PINs must have the same number of digits.
  • You cannot configure a Guest PIN unless you have already configured a Host PIN.
alias_alias The alias that, when received by Pexip Infinity, will cause it to route the call to this service (Virtual Meeting Room, Virtual Auditorium or Virtual Reception).

The alias entered here must match exactly the alias as it is received by Pexip Infinity. Wildcards and regular expressions are not supported.

In most cases, the alias received by Pexip Infinity will be the same as the alias that the conference participant dialed from their endpoint, but there are some exceptions, described in About aliases.

You may also want to define multiple aliases for the same service to ensure that it can be accessed by devices and protocols that enforce specific alias formats — for more information, see Using multiple aliases to access the same service.

alias_description An optional description of the alias. This is useful if you have more than one alias for a service.

For Virtual Meeting Rooms and Virtual Auditoriums with more than one alias, you must repeat the first 5 fields, and use the remaining 2 alias-related fields to define each individual alias:

name1,description1,pin1,allow_guests,guest_pin1,alias_alias1,alias_description1
name1,description1,pin1,allow_guests,guest_pin1,alias_alias2,alias_description2

Header row

A header row in the CSV file is optional. If included, it should be exactly like this:

name,description,pin,allow_guests,guest_pin,alias_alias,alias_description

Duplicates

If any records in the CSV file have the same name field but different description, pin, allow_guests, or guest_pin fields, only one Virtual Meeting Room (or Virtual Auditorium) with that name will be created. This Virtual Meeting Room (or Virtual Auditorium) will use the last record that was imported.

If any records in the CSV file have the same name as an existing Virtual Meeting Room (or Virtual Auditorium), the existing configuration will be overwritten by the imported Virtual Meeting Room (or Virtual Auditorium) configuration.

Restrictions

  • The name field cannot be blank.
  • All non-blank fields must contain valid data, for example the pin field must only contain digits.
  • If non-ASCII characters are used, the file must be encoded as UTF-8 text.

Examples

To import a Virtual Meeting Room called alice with a single alias of meet.alice, and a second Virtual Meeting Room called bob with aliases meet.bob and meet.bobby, you would create the following CSV file:

alice,,,,,meet.alice,
bob,,,,,meet.bob,
bob,,,,,meet.bobby,

To import Virtual Meeting Rooms for Alice, Bob and Charlie that each have different Host and Guest PINs you would create the following CSV file:

alice,,1234,True,6789,meet.alice,
bob,,4567,True,9876,meet.bob,
charlie,,5432145,True,5556789,meet.charlie,

Importing the CSV file

If you want to import Virtual Meeting Room data and Virtual Auditorium data you must create separate CSV files.

To import the data in the CSV file to Pexip Infinity:

  1. On the Pexip Infinity Administrator interface, go to either:
    • Service configuration > Virtual Meeting Rooms or
    • Service configuration > Virtual Auditoriums.
  2. Select Import.
  3. Choose the CSV file to import and select Save.

Exporting Virtual Meeting Room or Virtual Auditorium configuration

You can export all of your Virtual Meeting Room or Virtual Auditorium configuration data to a CSV file. This produces a CSV file in the same format as described above for importing configuration data. The file includes a header row.

This feature exports basic configuration only. It does not export the configuration for the themes, Automatically Dialed Participants, bandwidth limitations associated with each service, or (for Virtual Auditoriums) Host view and Guest view selections.

To export the data:

  1. On the Pexip Infinity Administrator interface, go to either:
    • Service configuration > Virtual Meeting Rooms or
    • Service configuration > Virtual Auditoriums.
  2. Select Export. This takes you to the Export configuration page.
  3. Select Download.
  4. Follow your browser's prompts to save or open the file.