Inviting people to cohost a webinar

Last updated: 2024-01-31Contributors
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RingCentral Webinar APIs are in beta

The RingCentral Webinar API is currently in beta. Developers should be aware of the following:

  • While efforts will bbe made to notify developers of changes that may impact them, no guarantees are offered around backwards compatibility. Changes can be introduced at any time that may impact your applications.
  • Webinar APIs are not currently available in our sandbox environment and developers are asked to do development in our production environment.

Partners wishing to build products for RingCentral customers should apply to the Webinar Partner Developer Program to obtain a free Developer license for RingCentral Webinar.

The invitiation process for webinars facilitates the recruitment and signup of hosts, cohosts and panelists for a webinar. The process helps to not only register the user for the webinar, but also assigns the appropriate role to those registrants. Those invited through this process will be sent a special join URL to be used exclusively by those who will be helpng to facilitate the webinar session. The join URL will allow invitees to access the webinar's bridge, which enables them to broadcast their video and audio, as well as share their screen with webinar attendees.

Inviting people to attend a webinar

Those people you hope will attend a webinar, and not help facilitate the webinar, must be invited or asked to attend via other means. This requires webinar hosts to perform their own independent outreach to attendees to register for the webinar.

Inviting hosts, cohosts and other active contributors

There is one primary endpoint used to manage all invitees. That endpoint allows a developer to both add, invite and delete invitees in a single operation or API call, reducing the likelihood of being rate limited while managing your set of webinar collaborators. The code sample below shows how one can invite multiple people, while also deleting an invitee and updating another.

const RC = require('@ringcentral/sdk').SDK

var rcsdk = new RC({
    'server':       process.env.RC_SERVER_URL,
    'clientId':     process.env.RC_CLIENT_ID,
    'clientSecret': process.env.RC_CLIENT_SECRET
});
var platform = rcsdk.platform();
platform.login({ 'jwt':  process.env.RC_JWT })

platform.on(platform.events.loginSuccess, function(e){
    invite_to_webinar()
});

async function invite_to_webinar(){
    try {
    console.log('fetching preference...')
    var webinarId = '<INSERT WEBINAR ID>'
    var sessionId = '<INSERT SESSION ID>'
    var endpoint = '/webinar/configuration/v1/webinars/'+webinarId+'/sessions/'+sessionId+'/invitees'
    platform.post(endpoint, {
        addedInvitees: [
        {
            'firstName': 'Leia',
            'lastName': 'Organa',
            'email': '[email protected]',
            'role': 'Cohost',
            'sendInvite': true
        }
        {
            'firstName': 'Lando',
            'lastName': 'Calrissian',
            'email': '[email protected]',
            'role': 'Panelist',
            'sendInvite': true
        }
        ],
        updatedInvitees:[
        {
            'id': '1234567',
            'firstName': 'Grogu'
        }
        ],
        deletedInvitees: [
        {
            'id': '987654'
        }
        ]
    })
        .then(function(resp) {
          return resp.json()
        })
        .then(function (json) {
            console.log('Response: ', json )
        });
    } catch(e) {
        console.log("An error occured: ", e.message)
        process.exit(1)
    }
});

Assigning the 'Attendee' role to an invitee

The invitation process exists to facilitate the collaboration between hosts, cohosts, panelist and other active contributors to a webinar. Therefore, specifying the Attendee role when creating an invite should result in an error.

Sending a custom invitation email to invitees

By default RingCentral will compose and transmit an email to all new invitees. However, some may wish to compose and send an invitation to hosts and cohosts of a webinar through a third-party system in order to exercise more control and oversight over that onboarding experience. To support this, when creating invitees for a webinar, one can set the sendInvite property associated with each invitee to false.

After registering the invitees with the webinar, the response will include for each new invitee a unique joinUri parameter which can be sent to the invitee via your own email system.

Inviting hosts and cohosts from your own company

If you wish to invite someone to help host an internal webinar, then you can invite them by their user ID, rather than specifying their email. To do so, one would invite them using the linkedUser property. For example:

'addedInvitees': [
    {
        linkedUser: {
            'accountId': '<YOUR ACCOUNT ID>',
            'userId': '<USERS EXTENSION ID>',
            'domain': 'pbx'
        }
    }
]