About Rendezvous

[This is preliminary documentation and subject to change.]

Rendezvous controls provide a mechanism to advertise and discover multiparty conferences. The following describes a set of COM components and interfaces to send and receive announcements of multiparty, multimedia conferences.

Rendezvous is part of the IP Multicast Conferencing Platform designed for Windows® operating systems.

Features

• Provides the abstraction of a conference directory for manipulating announcements of multimedia conferences.
• Provides security through authentication, encryption, and per-announcement access control. (Not implemented for Windows NT® 5 beta 1.)
• Provides a common schema for a conference announcement, enabling searches by attribute values. Allows extensions through a provider-maintained attribute (conference blob) in the schema. Provides a framework for synchronization of attributes shared between the common schema and the contents of the provider-interpreted attribute.

Architecture

The following descriptions and diagram illustrate key aspects of the system architecture.

• The client may manipulate conferences stored on an ILS dynamic directory server with Rendezvous controls. The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is used to communicate with the server.
• The Rendezvous controls provide dual COM interfaces for scripting and programming.
• A Session Announcement Protocol (SAP) server with direct access to the internet listens to conference announcements on the Internet and populates ILS dynamic server with the conference information. Similarly, it also announces the locally created conferences whose scope includes the Internet. (The SAP server is not planned for Windows NT 5.)