Board Review: Azure Communication Services (SPOOL) [Rooms] (Android & iOS)

[garchiro7]

Team members: antonsamson@microsoft.com elavarasid@microsoft.com radubulboaca@microsoft.com

Rooms overview

Azure Communication Services (ACS) Rooms is a set of APIs, used by Contoso server applications to create a server-managed conversation space with fixed set of lifetime and participants, pre-defining rules from server-tier both who and when can communicate (like scheduled meeting creation).

With the Public Preview release of ACS Rooms, Contoso will be able to: 1) create a meeting space with known time coordinates (start/end time), 2) join voice/video calls within that meeting space using the ACS web calling SDK or native mobile calling SDKs, 3) add participants to a room, 4) assign pre-defined roles to room participants, 5) set rooms call join policies (e.g., open or closed room), and 6) consume Event Grid notifications for calling events.

The server-side functionalities can be accessed via a refreshed API and a full set of SDKs (.NET, Java, Python, JavaScript/TypeScript).

The main scenarios where Rooms can best be used:

• Virtual Visits (e.g., telemedicine, remote financial advisor, virtual classroom, etc...)
• Virtual Events (e.g., live event, company all-hands, live concert, etc...)

Champion scenarios

Contoso College is a fictional educational institution that provides both on-campus and online programs. Contoso College administrator would like to create a virtual space/room for each offered course where course owner can hold virtual meetings and exchange messages with students. Only registered students should have access to associated room.

Detailed champion scenario: Rooms Azure Board Review - Champion Scenarios - Overview (visualstudio.com)

Rooms Architecture specification

Rooms service builds on top of existing IC3 calling services. The service acts as abstraction and coordinating layer between public APIs and IC3 services. It is compute-only service at first, all storage being handled by IC3 Scheduling Service.

Room service itself will NOT be on active calling path. Call operations (e.g., join call) do not go via Rooms server API, except for roster-management. Rooms API is service-to-service, with no user-level actions.

Rooms service main responsibilities:

• API and Server SDK for Room CRUD operations
• API and Server SDK for Room Participant operations
• ACS server authentication, resolve ACS resource ID metadata
• Coordinate with Scheduling Service to create Room

Detailed rooms architecture document

Rooms Concept

Here are the main scenarios where rooms are useful:

• Rooms enable scheduled communication experience. Rooms help service platforms deliver meeting-style experiences while still being suitably generic for a wide variety of industry applications. Services can schedule and manage rooms for patients seeking medical advice, financial planners working with clients, and lawyers providing legal services.
• Rooms enable invite-only experience. Rooms allow your services to control which users can join the Room for a virtual appointment with doctors or financial consultants. Developers can use the "Join Policy" for a Room, to either let all or a subset of Azure Communication Services users to join a Rooms meeting.
• Rooms enable structured communications through roles and permissions. Rooms allow developers to assign predefined roles to users to exercise a higher degree of control and structure in communication. e.g., Only presenters can speak and share content in a large meeting or in a virtual conference.

When to use rooms:

Details: Azure Communication Services Rooms overview - An Azure Communication Services concept document | Microsoft Docs

API View links:

Android

Android: azure-communication-calling (version 2.4.0-beta.1) - Enable Rooms and roles in BETA - apiview.dev

iOS

iOS: AzureCommunicationCalling (version 2.4.0-beta.1) - Enable Rooms and roles in BETA - apiview.dev

[kyle-patterson]

Scheduled for 8/10 2p-4p PDT

[tg-msft]

Recording (MS INTERNAL ONLY)

[antonsamson-msft]

As requested in the review, we have uploaded a revision to the shared iOS API View and have since received a sign off for our proposed changes: AzureCommunicationCalling (version 2.4.0-beta.1)

However, we are exploring releasing the new Rooms functionality sooner as a part of the 2.3.0-beta.1 release instead of 2.4.0-beta.1 and are seeking feedback. The approved changes for 2.4.0-beta.1 are built on top of 2.3.0-beta.1 and should pose no additional risk if applied to 2.3.0-beta.1.

[antonsamson-msft]

API Views were approved for iOS and Android (offline) and PRs merged.

2.3.0-beta.1 iOS API View 2.4.0-beta.1 Android API View

Changes delivered as a part of Calling Client 2.4.0-beta.1 Android SDK and 2.3.0-beta.1 of iOS SDK.