Zoom's handling of expired meetings and PCC meeting integration

I have formally reported this issue to Zoom on several occasions and they firmly consider it to be a “feature” rather than a bug. I mentioned it as a concern during one of the PCC calls a while back, but today I ran into the exact problem and was able to grab some screen shots to share.

If a recurring meeting series expires Zoom will still allow the meeting to be launched again at any time just as if it is a meeting was set up with the “No Fixed Time” setting. As long as anyone tries to join the expired meeting series again within 1 year of the expiration, ( like by clicking on a published url on a mailing list ) , the meeting will start. Once the meeting is launched the 1 year timer gets reset.

Once the recurring series expires, the meeting will no longer show up under upcoming meetings and if launched it will not show as being in progress or under previous meetings once the meeting ends when viewed from the host account.

In the case illustrated here I figured out that the Zoom meeting series expired clear back in October, but the bridge has continued to be used weekly ever since.

Not sure how PCC will deal with this scenario when trying to select an available bridge to use from the pool when someone tries to create a new meeting entry.

If already accounted for, GREAT! :heart: :rainbow: :unicorn: :bacon:
If not, I see this Zoom feature-bug as a pretty severe issue for the meeting integration. :grimacing:

Both screenshots were taken while the expired meeting was in progress. When logged into the onapmeetings12 account you can see that there is no indication of the Taskforce meeting being in progress and nothing listed under upcoming meetings:


After the meeting was concluded there is also nothing listed under previous meetings.

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Thanks Kenny for raising. Actually, PCC-created meetings never use the “No Fixed Time” setting, because it’s not conducive to our “shared bridge” model.

Because we use fixed-recurring schedule meetings, a meeting can only be entered by guests at the time it was scheduled for (actually, up to 10 minutes early). Zoom therefore prevents a person inadvertently steals the bridge by following a join link at the wrong time. PCC ensures an hour buffer between meetings using the same “bridge” user, and a meeting is allowed to continue for 40 to 45 minutes after it’s defined end time, after which it is forcibly ended, to ensure the bridge is free for the next meeting (including the 10 minutes join-early time).

Whenever you reschedule a meeting in PCC, if the reschedule would causes a conflict (including the hour buffer) on the bridge user it currently is scheduled on, the meeting is transparently moved to a different bridge user without changing any of the per-participant join URLs.

p.s. We actually have a different challenge, which is that Zoom doesn’t support fixed-time recurring meetings of more than 50 occurrences! So in fact, we are treating the “recurs 50 times” setting as “recurs forever” and will keep “shifting” the meeting in the background. (Again, this is transparent to the users.)

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BTW our new PCC meetings feature uses an entirely new “pool” of Zoom users shared across all LF projects, and replaces the existing per-project, unit-rate billed accounts, so likewise there would not be a conflict with the meetings you currently have in these accounts which use No Fixed Time. Please see Project Control Center Committee Meeting Management FAQ for more info.

-snip-

Actually those two things are very closely related. The ONAP community also doesn’t use the “No Fixed Time” setting. Unfortunately “No Fixed Time” is the exact behavior Zoom defaults to after meeting 50 of 50 has occurred. After that, folks can still keep using the same bridge forever, but all visibility into the meeting from the account has been lost.

From what you’ve described the PCC integration will keep nudging the end date forward in Zoom so that meeting 50 of 50 never occurs. If that’s the case then it sounds like the Zoom feature/bug is covered. :grin:

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