I’m always frustrated when I can not use our existing conference room hardware natively with Nextcloud Talk. The meeting organisator has to sacrifice his personal laptop and hook it up via HDMI when he chooses Nextcloud Talk for a hybrid meeting.
Because auf this, Nextcloud Talk is getting neglected by meeting organisators. They prefer Teams, Zoom or Google Meetup. Here, the conference room hardware can take care of everything and the meeting organisator can just walk into the room and press “join meeting” on the conference hardware touchscreen.
I’d like to have the ability to integrate with a hardware conference room solution of any vendor, e.g. Logitech or Polycom.
To be specific, with Teams, Zoom or Pexip integration for Polycom I can create a meeting and select a time and a room. When I enter the room ~15 minutes before the meeting starts, the Polycom touchscreen already shows a big button to join the scheduled meeting.
I opened a feature request on Github here and a Nextcloud team member said that anything with a browser should work.
My question for the community is: Does anybody here have any recommendations or can share some experience in how to set up Nextcloud Talk with conference room hardware by using the integrated browsers in a foolproof way?
He also said: “For others, specific hardware that connects to specific software, we don’t have it.”
In order for these integrations to work, the specific device has to be able to interact directly with the specific software / platform, you’re using for your video calls. So if the device doesn’t natively support Nextcloud Talk, these features won’t work.
Or to put it simple: If the device has an integrated web browser that supports WebRTC, you can use that to manually log-in to your Nextcloud and start the video call, otherwise it won’t work at all.
I know. I were specifically asking if anybody here can share his experience in setting up conference room hardware using an integrated browser (WebRTC). The preface is just for context.
I don’t think there is a lot you can set up. Most of the device specific features and integrations will simply not work, if you are using the integrated browser. If your company is using some kind of SSO solution, you might be able to get that working for authentication, depending on what operating system is running in the back end. However, the overall experience will definitely not be as foolproof or seamless as the natively supported services. It will be more like, Starting the browser, log in to Nextcloud, click on Talk, start a call. Basically the same way it works on any other computer.
Perhaps others here have some tips for you… But at the end of the day, these are proprietary and pre-configured appliances that are only sold to companies. Your best bet, to get more information or documentation, is to contact the vendor / supplier of your specific product.
