Webex Meetings

Cisco Webex is an app-centric, cloud-based service that provides a complete collaboration suite for teams to create, meet, message, call, care, white board, and share, regardless of whether they are together or apart—in one continuous workstream before, during, and after meetings. It is built to help teams work seamlessly. It is simple, secure, complete, and open, and provides a space for people to work better. The core capabilities of Cisco Webex are Meetings, Messaging, and Calling. The Cisco Webex platform, app-centric design, hybrid services, and architecture of Cisco Webex create a unique and differentiated service. For more information on the solution, refer to Cisco Webex.

Cisco Webex Meetings provides a Messaging API that VFC is able to use to retrieve content from Webex Rooms. The Webex Import Source uses the Webex Messaging API to list and download available recordings, query and add participants before ingestion. Separate recordings are created for each recorded Webex user. Each recording contains details of all meeting participants. Once triggered, Webex content is ingested indefinitely in near real-time with an unlimited number of retry attempts if the media is unavailable for any reason. If the integration is restarted or the first recording start time reset, no duplicate content is created within VFC.

There are certain pre-requisite steps that must be performed within Cisco Webex Portal to ensure that Meetings are recorded and available for VFC to download:

For a general description of Verba Import sources, refer to Import sources.

1. Prerequisites

• Two components, a Cisco Webex integration application and a VFC Import Source are required.
• Firewall access must be arranged as two-way internet communication is required between the Import Source and Webex.
  • Incoming authentication arrives from Webex to the Webex Integration redirect URI. The URL and port number are fully configurable and are encrypted using TLS over HTTP. The port number cannot be 443 as this is already used by the VFC Web Application.
  • Outgoing API calls to Webex for content and user queries is on Port 443 and through https://webexapis.com/v1
  • Outgoing calls to retrieve media are on Port 443 and typically through https://<company name>.webex.com/ <company name>. Webex detemines this URI.
  • If used, Compliance Site URL must also be granted firewall access, including the port number.
• VFC video or audio recording license. If audio-only recording is used (Transcode Video to Audio is set), it is mandatory to install Windows Media Foundation (Windows Server 2012 or newer) on the server where the Webex Import Source runs.

2. Create a Cisco Webex Integration

To create a Webex integration, a Webex account backed by Cisco Webex Common Identity (CI) is required. If no Webex account is available, sign up. If you are using Webex Meetings, your site must be on Common Identity. Typically, the user creating the API Integration needs to be the Compliance Officer on Webex. Go to https://developer.webex.com/my-apps and press the Create a new app button. Then press the Create an integration button to create an OAuth Integration.

Once all the integration values have been entered, press the Add Integration button. Make a note of the two important values shown, Client Id and Client Secret. They are required during the next step, configuration of the VFC Webex Import Source.

3. Create a WebEx Import Source

Follow the steps in VFC to create a new Import source. All settings are mandatory, except the TLS configuration settings.

Step 1 - Open the VFC Web interface then select Data > Import Sources from the top menu

Step 2 - Select Add New Import Source.

Step 3 - Complete the configuration according to the requirements in the following table

NOTE: Ingestion of Webex content is always behind real-time. The closest the ingestion can get to real-time is: Webex Recording Start Timestamp + (Webex Maximum Recording Length * 2) + Webex Availability Delay.

4. Create an active Data Management Policy

Follow the steps below to configure the Data Import action. Note, the policy must be active before proceeding to authenticate the VFC Import Source with Webex.

Step 1 - In the Verba web interface, go to Data > Data Management Policies.

Step 2 - Select Add New Data Management Policy.

Step 3 - For the action, select Data Import.

Step 4 - Under Available Import Sources, select the Import Source that you created, then select Add below the text field.

Step 5 - Configure the policy details, based on the information that is shown in the configuration items summary table below.

Step 6 - Set up how frequently the Import runs in the Scheduling section.

Step 7 - Click Save.

5. Authenticate the VFC Webex Import Source with Webex

6. Validate Webex Authentication

OAuth token status information can be displayed by entering the first part of the Redirect URI in a web browser.

http(s)://<VFC Hostname>:<VFC Port>

VFC Hostname is the name of the VFC server

VFC Port is the port opened in the customer firewall for Webex access.

7. Configure Users in VFC

Follow the steps below to configure users in VFC:

Step 1 - In the VFC web interface, go to Users > Users.

Step 2 - Click Add new User.

Step 3 - Enter the email address of the user is in lowercase and set the value to the same email address that the user joins Webex with.

Step 4 - Add user information, making sure the validity of the user extends to cover the range of their Webex recordings.

Step 5 - Click Save.

8. Configure Extensions in VFC

Follow the steps below to configure extensions in VFC:

Step 1 - In the VFC web interface, go to Users > Extensions.

Step 2 - Click Add new Extension.

Step 3 - Set the extension in lowercase to the same email address that the user joins WebEx with.

Step 4 - Set the Type to User/Agent Id.

Step 5 - Set the Recording Settings to Voice and Video.

Step 6 - Click Save.

9. Resilience

If Webex content failed to ingest, resilience is provided by the retry buffer. This buffer contains VFC CDR files in XML format that failed to be ingested and must be retried. The Webex import source automatically adds a batch of up to 25 of these files to the current ingestion each time it runs. Once added, the XML file is removed from the retry buffer, but is automatically readded if the ingestion fails again. If the CDR is successfully ingested, it appears in the ingestion status report alongside the other content. Files can be manually added or removed to the retry buffer if required for troubleshooting purposes. Retry buffer capability also enables the import source to track real-time, as it enables historic failures to be retried.

Alternatively, if the VFCImport Service is required to be stopped for reasons of troubleshooting or maintenance, the manual procedure below must be used:

Step 1 - In the VFC web interface, disable the Data Management Policy associated with the Webex Import Source.
Step 2 - Open Windows Explorer and go to Program Files\Verba\work\cdrimport\webex\laststate\policyId_importSourceId
Step 3 - Open the policyId_importSourceId.cursor file in a text editor program. The file contains one line and looks similar to the following example:
c84f2f698fc9d64d64ed161d87b00c25_I_251182078220051266_19d0243a-9fd0-11d1-ac11-13453884b96c;2023.02.02 07:00:00.000
Step 4 - Set the timestamp to a date and time before the failure ensuring this time stamp plus the import batch duration and the recording lag is less than the current time stamp and then save the file.
Step 5 - Re-enable the Data Management Policy associated with the Webex Import Source

10. Folders used by Webex Import Source

11. Types of alerts raised by the Webex Import Source

12. Webex Content Ingestion Status Reporting

The Webex Import Source does not generate report files, but at the end of each batch, a notification alert is raised containing details of Webex content ingested into VFC.

Example alert shown below. Note that due to the overlap approach used in the sliding window mechanism, mention of conversations already imported is as expected.

If no recordings are found in Webex for the time period of the Webex batch sliding window, an alert is generated. This alert does not indicate an error, only that Webex has no content for the time period specified.

13. Webex Metadata