How to start a multi-user conversation in Lync UCWA

Question

To start off, here's a bit of info on what I'm trying to accomplish, so if there's a better way of doing it, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

I'm creating and Android Kiosk application that leverages Lync UCWA to sit at the entrance of my work and when visitors enter the office, they'll use the Kiosk to notify somebody in the office that there is a guest.

I've had a new Lync user created for this purpose, which will be the account authenticated on the kiosk and will be the user sending outgoing messaging invitations.

What I want to accomplish is to create a group conversation by adding multiple people to a conversation so that everybody gets the message and somebody can then respond to the group chat letting everybody else know that they will go to the front and greet the guest. I'm able to send a message to a single person, but haven't figured out how to get multiple people on a conversation.

I've tried to start a conversation with a single person and then call the addParticipant endpoint to add others to the conversation, but that hasn't worked for me yet. From what I'm seeing, I can't add somebody until the 1st person accepts the invitation, which poses the problem as I can't be guaranteed that person will accept it.

Am I taking a wrong approach here or am I missing something? I tried to think what code would be helpful here, but didn't think it would help, so if I see that it's needed by follow-ups, I'll post anything relevant to the topic.

Answer 1

The situation you are describing might be best served with a slightly altered solution. This kiosk is the entry point for a guest to contact a set of users and as you have discovered if those users don't respond your guests is left without much recourse.

If you were to change the approach to expose an anonymous meeting for the guest to join, it would be possible to have a UCMA application join and attempt to facilitate the communication between the guest and the users. The UCMA application could facilitate adding the expected users or contacting them and executing a script to notify them of the guests arrival.

You would want to wrap/expose a way (most likely a Web API) to communicate the meeting created by UCMA to the web application as UCWA needs specific information (conferenceUri) in order to join anonymously.

Answer 2

I am working something very similar where I need to be able to send to a number of users at once and avoid the send and accept scenario you mentioned.

So far from my testing and reading this doesn't seem to be possible with just UCWA. What I have been looking into is using the SDKs available for Lync, which are UCMA and the Persistent Chat SDK.

Using these you would need to create your own application which could act as a REST API for preforming the group sending.