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Using External Identifier for Meeting Participants

Upon joining the BlueJeans meeting via the Web Embed SDK, the participants who join the meeting are considered guest users, as they are not required to have a BlueJeans account or be logged in. This means integrators can only have their name to identify them which may not be unique enough to properly identify individuals who want to associate specific meeting participants with users in their own systems.

To address this issue, the Web Embed SDK introduces the "external ID" feature. This feature allows developers to pass a unique ID (aka. external ID) of up to 1024 characters associated with each user in their systems while joining the meeting.. This external ID can be accessed through the use of Command Center APIs.

Integrators can benefit from the external ID feature, which allows them to track meeting participants by extracting endpoint information from BlueJeans systems. This feature provides comprehensive participant information.

Use case: Tracking Student Participation in Remote Learning Sessions

In a digital education setting, an application developed by a third-party developer assigns a "unique Id/external ID" to each student at the time of registration. This external Id is then employed when students participate in classes through the Web Embed SDK, facilitating developers to transmit the unique Id to the BlueJeans system.

With the support of passing external ID, helps developers to identify students who joined the virtual class, by preventing mix-ups between similar student profiles. It also simplifies attendance tracking, recognizing a student who joins a class multiple times from any endpoint, ensuring accurate participation tracking.

Steps

  • First, create a unique code or external ID for every person who joins the meeting. It is important to ensure that the identifier is unique and has a maximum length of 1024 characters.
  • Next, use the join meeting API to join the meeting and ensure that the API accepts the external identifier as a parameter. 
    BJNEEmbedSDK.joinMeeting({
    meetingInfo: {
        meetingId: "MEETINGID",
        passcode: "PASSCODE",
        name: "NAME",
        eid: "EID_VALUE"
    }
});

  • When joining a meeting, you can provide an external identifier (eid) as an optional parameter to the join meeting function.

Note

  • The eid will be discarded if you provide more than 1024 characters for the external identifier. It is important to validate the length of the external identifier before passing it to the join meeting API.
  • To uniquely identify a participant using an external ID (eid), make sure that the external ID provided for the participant is unique, such as an encrypted User ID or an email address, etc.
  • eid is stored in UTF-8 encoding as a string.
  • BlueJeans does not use the external identifier (eid) you supply for any internal purpose. Value of "eid" that is supplied to the Web Embed SDK, is simply transmitted and stored alongside participant information for customers to associate BlueJeans meeting participants with their users. We strongly advise encrypting any sensitive data or Personally Identifiable Information (PII) prior to submitting it as an external ID to BlueJeans.

How to retrieve the external identifier using  command center APIs  

Whenever a participant joins the meeting using their external identifier, you can retrieve the participant details along with the external identifier through the Command Center API (Ref. How to fetch the external identifier from BlueJeans systems via endpoint API).