Building Microsoft-powered native video meetings on LinkedIn

With over 744 million members on LinkedIn, we want to make professional conversations more personal by helping members meet face-to-face over video, especially in this time of hybrid and remote work where many of us cannot meet in person. As the world has increasingly embraced virtual connections, video communication has become essential to professional conversations

Driving development with a members-first mentality

Video conferencing as a part of the messaging experience allows members to connect virtually while maintaining the context of their existing conversation.

• To assist those who want to connect beyond messaging, they have also built smart actions that recommend when to schedule a video meeting.

Unlocking video conferencing across LinkedIn

A new service, LinkedIn Conferencing Infrastructure (LICI), provides a layer of abstraction for product-based microservices to interact with Azure

• The client SDK wraps the Azure service client SDKs to provide LinkedIn apps on every platform with a simple API for launching a video meeting

Testing and Monitoring

To make sure there are no regressions introduced with new iterations of the service, they run validation tests that mimic the user behavior in both early integration and production environments on a cron-like schedule.

Conferencing-as-a-service for LinkedIn

LICI empowers partner teams to build new conferencing features while acting as the control plane between the LinkedIn client libraries, Azure Communication Services, and LinkedIn products.

• Some of the areas that LICI handles include: user access credentials and tokens, orchestration and setup of the conference, managing the conference lifecycle, and managing the participant roster.

Future plans

Additional features coming soon

• Calendar integration
• Allowing for messaging chat while you are in a video conversation
• Screen sharing and virtual backgrounds
• As the professional landscape transitions to a mix of in-person and virtual communication, LinkedIn is committed to building the best possible video meeting experience for their members

Building for scale

Azure Communications Services is built on the same technology that powers Microsoft Teams

• When a LinkedIn member wants to start a video meeting, LinkedIn services will communicate with Azure Communication Services to generate a user token and call token
• LinkedIn apps can join the call by using the Azure client library
• Once LinkedIn members are in the meeting, the service handles all communication for the video call

Partnership with ACS

ACS has helped tune and influence the roadmap to include their necessary feature set

• They have also influenced the monitoring signals and events that are useful for customers to ingest from Azure Communication Services
• Looking at the API from a customer perspective, they have helped them tune their API signature
• The Azure team has been responsive and agile in making any desired changes

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