Scheduling Pexip Infinity meetings using Microsoft Exchange

The VMR Scheduling for Exchange feature allows you to create an add-in that enables Microsoft Outlook desktop and Web App users in Office 365 or Exchange environments to quickly and easily add a Pexip VMR to their meeting invitations, enabling any meeting to be held over video.

Users can host their meeting in a single-use VMR that is created specifically for the meeting and only available for its duration, or they can host their meeting in their own personal VMR. You can either let users decide which type of VMR to use for each meeting, or make just one type of VMR available in your deployment.

VMR Scheduling for Exchange is an optional licensed feature within the Pexip Infinity platform. When this feature has been enabled, you can create VMR scheduling for Exchange integrations to one or more Microsoft Exchange deployments.

In this topic:

Supported Exchange deployments

Pexip Infinity VMR Scheduling for Exchange is supported on the following Microsoft Exchange deployments:

  • Office 365
  • Exchange 2013 (with the latest updates)
  • Exchange 2016 (with the latest updates)
  • Exchange 2019 (with the latest updates)

Supported clients

The Pexip Infinity VMR Scheduling for Exchange add-in is supported on all Outlook clients that support the Microsoft Outlook add-in API. At the time of release, this includes the following clients:

  • Outlook as part of Office 2013 and later on Windows
  • Outlook as part of Office 2016 and later on Mac
  • Outlook as part of Office 365 on Windows and Mac
  • Outlook Web Application (OWA) when connected to any supported Microsoft Exchange deployment.

There are some minor usability issues when using Outlook add-ins under certain circumstances; see Troubleshooting VMR Scheduling for Exchange for more information.

The Pexip Infinity VMR Scheduling for Exchange add-in is dependent on the Microsoft Outlook add-in API. Any changes to the API should be backwards-compatible, but may impact the functionality of the Pexip add-in.

Support for delegate access to calendars

An update to the Microsoft Outlook add-in API enabled add-ins for users managing a calendar to which they have delegate access. Pexip Infinity version 24 and later supports this API update, enabling the use of the VMR Scheduling for Exchange add-in within delegate calendars. To enable this:

  • Users must be using Office 365 and a version of Outlook that supports add-ins for delegates. At the time of writing, this only applies to Outlook on Windows or Mac as part of an Office 365 subscription. Outlook should be updated to version 1910 (build 12130.20272) or newer. For more information about which Outlook clients support which features, see Microsoft's documentation.
  • Delegate users must be set up in accordance with Microsoft's instructions for granting delegate access.
  • If you have upgraded Pexip Infinity from a version prior to v24, after upgrading you must download and re-upload the manifest file. For instructions on how to do this, see Making the scheduling add-in available to users. Note that users will then need to restart Outlook, and may need to wait up to 24 hours for the add-in to be enabled.

Network architecture and firewalls

The diagram below summarizes the connectivity required between the components of the Pexip and Exchange/O365 deployments.

In this example, there are firewalls in place between the Pexip Infinity deployment and the Exchange and Office 365 deployments. Your own deployment may or may not have these, but in all cases you must ensure the following connections are permitted:

  • from the Pexip Infinity Management Node to each Microsoft Exchange server: HTTPS, TCP port 443
  • from the Pexip Infinity Management Node to login.microsoftonline.com (if you are using OAuth)
  • from the Pexip Infinity Management Node to the load balancer (if you have one): HTTPS, TCP port 443

  • From the Pexip Infinity Conferencing Nodes to the User OAuth token URI (if personal VMRs are enabled)

  • from the Outlook clients to the hostname specified by the Add-in server FQDN. This must be reachable either directly, or by using split DNS to resolve to a Transcoding Conferencing Node, Proxying Edge Node, or reverse proxy: HTTPS, TCP port 443

  • from the Outlook clients to https://ajax.aspnetcdn.com and https://appsforoffice.microsoft.com. These connections are required in order to use the JavaScript API for Office — for more information, see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/add-ins/reference/javascript-api-for-office.

    It is possible to host these resources locally for deployments that are entirely offline. For more information, see Advanced options.

Using a load balancer in your Exchange deployment

VMR scheduling for Exchange integrations support the use of load balancers in front of the Exchange servers. However, NTLM Authentication will not work if a Layer 7 load balancer is in use. To work around this issue we recommend reconfiguring your load balancer to Layer 4.

In all deployments using load balancers, the FQDN of the load balancer must still be configured in the list of Exchange domains, even if the EWS URL uses the address of the load balancer.