What's new in version 25?

Adaptive Composition is a new layout option for Virtual Meeting Rooms:

• Powered by AI and machine learning to give users a more natural, engaging, video-first meeting experience.

• It continuously analyzes each video feed from all participants and uses automatic face detection and framing to create an optimized view of that participant, or group of participants where there are several people in that video feed.

• Independent of where the participants are and which device they are using. No end-user action or configuration is required.

Adaptive Composition was available as "tech preview" in previous versions of Pexip Infinity.

Pexip's Epic telehealth integration enables healthcare organizations to hold video-based visits in Pexip Virtual Meeting Room (VMRs). The Pexip solution:

• Provides secure, easy-to-join telehealth visits from any location.
• Integrates seamlessly with Epic's standard video visit workflow.
• Uses context-aware linking within an Epic appointment to enable providers and patients to meet together over video.
• Allows providers (physicians/doctors) to directly launch their video visit from Hyperspace, Haiku, Canto or EpicCare.
• Allows patients to launch the video visit directly from MyChart.
• Supports clinic-to-clinic and teleconsult workflows (remote provider).
• Requires no downloads or plugins.
• Enables HIPAA compliance.

Epic Electronic Health Record (EHR) customers include hospitals, health systems, and physician practices.

The One-Touch Join feature now includes:

• support for endpoints registered to Webex that are on a separate network to your Conferencing Nodes (such as those used in a home office)
• the ability to disable alarms for all endpoints
• the ability to customize the meeting subject for all meetings, or for private meetings only.

The VMR Scheduling for Exchange feature now includes:

• the ability to schedule meetings in users' personal VMRs

• a change to the way in which the public key of the Microsoft Exchange Server Auth Certificate is obtained, meaning that you no longer need to provide all the FQDNs of all the Exchange servers in your deployment; instead, you only need provide a single URL for each certificate in use.

Pexip's Cloud Video Interop (CVI) integration with Microsoft Teams now includes:

• Enhanced Teams Connector instance status within Pexip Infinity, showing call capacity and media load (Status > Live View and Status > Microsoft Teams Connectors). After upgrading, enhanced status reporting has to be enabled within Pexip Infinity via Call control > Microsoft Teams Connectors. You must also ensure that your Pexip Infinity Management Node can communicate with the new Azure Event Hub component that is created as part of the Teams Connector upgrade.
• Transcription indicators are displayed and messages are played to CVI participants when a Teams conference is being transcribed.
• A recording indicator is now shown on VTC systems that are gatewayed into Teams live events.
• Improved/more granular disconnection reasons for VTC systems leaving Teams meetings are shown in the Pexip Infinity Administrator interface and administrator logs.

Other changes and improvements to the Teams Connector include:

• Version 25 of the Teams Connector contains updates that necessitate an upgrade to your Pexip platform to ensure compatibility with the latest updates to the Microsoft Teams APIs and to the Teams Connector's latest features.
• You must be using Az module version 4.7.0 or later.

We strongly recommend that you upgrade your Pexip deployment — both the Pexip Infinity platform and the Pexip Teams Connector — to version 25 as soon as practicable.

Integrating Microsoft Teams with Pexip Infinity

Upgrading the Teams Connector to the latest software

Viewing Teams Connector instance, call and participant status

The following theme elements have been added to support the new Microsoft Teams integration features (as described above) for participants that are in a Teams meeting:

• New icon_transcribing.svg graphic which is displayed when a conference is being transcribed (icon_transcribing.png in legacy version 1 themes).
• New transcribing_indicator_text setting in the themeconfig.json file. This defaults to "Transcribing" and is temporarily displayed when a conference is being transcribed.

• Two new audio files that are played when conference transcribing is used:

  • conf-transcribing_started_48kHz_mono.wav ("This call is being transcribed.")

  • conf-transcribing_stopped_48kHz_mono.wav ("Transcribing of this call has stopped.")

All WebRTC and ICE clients connecting to Conferencing Nodes have:

• Significantly improved initial connection times over WebRTC.
• Improved resilience/reconnection when a WebRTC connection is interrupted, or there is a change in network.

There are a range of new event sink management features for administrators:

• You can configure a set of options that control connectivity and failure retry limits (Platform > Global settings > Advanced event Sink Tuning).
• There is an easier method to restart an event sink via a restart button (System > Event sinks and then select the event sink).
• A new "Eventsink Reached Maximum Concurrent POSTs" alarm is raised if more than 1000 events are queued but have not been sent.
• Within the API, all participant_connected, participant_updated and participant_disconnected participant events include a new related_uuids field which is a list of related participant events.

• There is now a version 2 of the API, which is the default when creating a new event sink. In version 2:

  • There are new participant_media_stream_window and participant_media_streams_destroyed participant events.
  • The media_streams field is not included in participant_disconnected events.

Using event sinks to monitor conference and participant status

Event sink API

The v25.3 release contains the following administrative improvements:

• In policy, there is a new "prefer_ipv6" field in service configuration responses. This determines whether to use IPv6 for SIP media when dialing out from Pexip Infinity.

• The security wizard contains a new Tolerate iPAddress SubjectAlternativeNames in SIP/TLS certificates option. The default is No. Setting it to Yes enables Pexip Infinity to accept IP Address-type Subject Alternative Name entries in certificates used for SIP/TLS.

There is a new Enable legacy dialout API setting (Platform > Global settings > Connectivity) that controls the system behavior when dialing out via an Infinity Connect client or the client API to a participant from an ongoing conference.

When selected (enabled), calls placed via the:

• Infinity Connect client always use automatic routing and thus must match an appropriate Call Routing Rule.
• Client API or the legacy (webapp1) client can either use automatic routing or they can specify a dial-out protocol without any need for a Call Routing Rule i.e. it allows end-users to perform arbitrary dial outs (and thus circumvent any administrator-set rules).

When not selected (disabled), calls that are placed via:

• Any Infinity Connect client or via the client API always use automatic routing and thus must match an appropriate Call Routing Rule.

Note that dial out via the Administrator interface, management API or Automatically Dialed Participants (ADPs) is unaffected by this setting.

This new setting is disabled by default on upgrade and for new installations.

This means that when dialing out from an ongoing conference, any calls made via an Infinity Connect client (including RTMP calls to a streaming or recording service) now always use automatic routing and thus must match an appropriate Call Routing Rule for the call to be placed.

As of version 25, we recommend that the following URL structure is used when creating preconfigured links to launch a specific conference via the Infinity Connect web app:

https://<address>/webapp/#/?conference=<alias>&<any other parameters>

When using this format, the join parameters (conference alias and any other parameters such as the PIN), are automatically removed from the URL that is displayed in the browser's address bar.

Note that:

• This URL structure will not work on version 24 or earlier of Pexip Infinity, but any URLs using the previously recommended structure (https://<address>/webapp/conference/<alias>?<parameters>) will still work on v25, and the join parameters (but not the alias) will be removed from the browser's address bar.

• This structure is now used in the default VMR join instructions template when adding a new VMR Scheduling for Exchange integration.

This release contains the following administrative modifications:

• When deploying a Conferencing Node on an ESXi host you can now choose either Manual (ESXi 6.7 and above), Manual (ESXi 6.0 and 6.5) or Manual (ESXi 5.x) as appropriate. Note that:
  • AVX2 instruction set requires ESXi 6.0+ and VM hardware version 11+
  • AVX512 instruction set requires ESXi 6.7+ and VM hardware version 14+

Manually deploying a Conferencing Node on an ESXi host

Upgrading VM hardware versions

• In a 2 + 21 layout, up to 3 HD streams may now be sent between any 2 nodes (up to 2 current speakers and potentially 1 previous speaker). This means that a main speaker will now always see the other main speakers at high resolution.

• When taking packet captures (Utilities > Packet capture), WebRTC encryption keys may also be captured.

• Backup files produced by Pexip Infinity's inbuilt backup and restore mechanism now have a .pexbak extension, rather than .gpg.

When dialing out from an ongoing conference, any calls made via an Infinity Connect client (except for the legacy client) now always use automatic routing and thus must match an appropriate Call Routing Rule for the call to be placed.

When dialing out from an ongoing conference via the legacy client the default protocol is now Automatic (previously SIP).

The Infinity Connect clients have:

• Significantly improved initial connection times over WebRTC.
• Improved resilience/reconnection when a WebRTC connection is interrupted, or there is a change in network.

These improvements apply across all web browsers.