UCBC Meet: Video Conferencing and Meeting Rooms

UCBC Meet is UCBC's built-in video meeting product. This article covers how to start or schedule a meeting from the admin side, what participants actually see and can do once inside a meeting, the optional Meet Transcription feature, and the older, separate audio-only conferencing feature that still exists alongside it.

Overview#

• UCBC Meet (video meetings) is reached from the Meet page. You can start a meeting instantly ("Meet Now") or schedule one for later, with a shareable join link for guests who don't have a UCBC login at all.
• Once inside a meeting, the experience (webcam, screen sharing, chat, whiteboard, recording, live streaming, and so on) is provided by the meeting client itself, not by anything you configure on the admin side — those controls live inside the meeting window.
• Meet Transcription is an optional, system-wide add-on that turns on live, automatic transcription/translation inside meetings, once an engine and API key are configured.
• Legacy audio conferencing (Conference Centers, Rooms, Profiles, and Controls) is a separate, older, phone-dial-in-only conferencing feature, distinct from UCBC Meet's video rooms. It's covered briefly at the end of this article.

The UCBC Meet landing screen

Screenshot needed · meet-landing

How to Start a Meeting Right Now#

1. Go to Meet.
2. Type a Meeting Title in the box next to Meet Now (or leave the auto-filled title as-is).
3. Click Meet Now. The room is created immediately and you're taken straight into it as the host.
4. Once you're in, use Copy Link or the share link shown on the page to invite others — anyone with the link can join without a UCBC login.

How to Schedule a Meeting#

1. Go to Meet.
2. Click the small arrow next to Meet Now to open the Schedule Meeting panel.
3. Enter a Meeting Title.
4. Enter Attendees as a list of email addresses (comma, semicolon, or one per line) — each one gets a real calendar invite.
5. Choose the Date, Time, and Duration (15 to 120 minutes).
6. Optionally add a Description.
7. Click Schedule Meeting.

Attendees (and you, the organizer, if your email isn't already in the attendee list) receive an email with a calendar invite for the meeting — accepting it blocks the time on their own calendar. The invite includes the same join link anyone else would use. The meeting room itself isn't actually created in the background until someone first clicks to join it, so a scheduled meeting works correctly no matter how far in advance you book it.

Managing Scheduled and Active Meetings#

The Meet page shows a weekly calendar of upcoming and in-progress meetings, plus a Recent Meetings list.

• Click a meeting on the calendar, or Rejoin in Recent Meetings, to join or restart it — this works for both a meeting already running and a scheduled one being started early.
• Hover over a calendar entry and click the small × to delete that one meeting. If it had a scheduled date and attendees, they each receive a cancellation notice pulling it back off their calendar.
• Use Delete All Meetings to wipe every meeting on the calendar for a complete reset — this cannot be undone and does not send cancellation notices.

Only the person who actually created a meeting joins it as the host/moderator; anyone else clicking the same link — including another admin — joins as a regular participant.

The In-Meeting Experience#

Once inside a meeting, participants have access to:

• Webcam and screen sharing — share your camera, or share your screen with everyone else in the room.
• Live chat — a text chat panel visible to everyone in the meeting, with file sharing support.
• Whiteboard — a shared, collaborative drawing surface.
• Raise Hand and Reactions — quick, non-disruptive ways for participants to get the host's attention.
• Co-host promotion — the host can promote another participant to co-host (and remove that status again) from that person's entry in the participant list, giving them moderator-level controls too.
• Per-participant locking — the host/co-host can lock or unlock specific abilities for an individual guest from that participant's own menu: microphone, webcam, screen sharing, whiteboard, and chat (including file sharing) can each be locked independently. This is how you stop one guest from sharing their screen without muting or removing them entirely.
• Local recording — any participant allowed to record can save a recording of the meeting straight to their own computer. This records exactly what's visible on screen (video tiles, active screen share, or whiteboard) plus every participant's audio, and does not trigger your browser's "choose what to share" screen-recording prompt — you simply start and stop it from the Record control, and the file downloads to your device when you stop.
• Cloud recording — where enabled, the host can instead record to the server rather than to a local device.
• Live Streaming (RTMP) — the host can broadcast the meeting live to YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, or any other RTMP-compatible destination by entering that platform's stream key (or a custom server URL for "Other").
• Live Chat Bridge to YouTube/Facebook comments — when a live stream is running, comments posted on the YouTube/Facebook side can be bridged into the meeting (and replies sent back out) through the Live Chat Bridge feature. Setting up that bridge's own credentials/connection is covered in the Agent Portal documentation — this section is just the in-meeting experience of using it once it's configured.
• Waiting room — guests who aren't the host wait in a lobby with a customizable message until the host lets them in (anyone invited by email who already joined successfully before skips this automatically on a rejoin).

None of the in-meeting controls above are configured from a UCBC admin settings page — they're part of the meeting client itself, available directly inside the meeting window to whoever is hosting or has been given the relevant permission in that specific call.

The in-meeting experience, showing participant tiles and controls

Screenshot needed · meet-in-call

Meet Transcription (Optional)#

What it's for: turns on live, automatic transcription (and translation) inside UCBC Meet meetings. This is a system-wide, superadmin-level setting, not something configured per meeting.

How to Turn It On#

1. Go to Meet and open the Meet Transcription tab.
2. Choose a Provider: Azure Speech or OpenAI.
3. Fill in that provider's required fields — a Subscription Key and Region for Azure, or an API Key (and optionally a specific transcription model) for OpenAI.
4. Check Active.
5. Click Save.
6. Click Restart Meeting Service to apply the change. This step is required because the meeting engine only reads this configuration when it starts up — restarting ends every meeting currently in progress across the whole system, so do this at a planned, low-traffic time, not in the middle of the day.

Live Chat Bridge Settings#

A Live Chat Bridge tab also appears on the Meet page for admins with access to it — it embeds the same YouTube/Facebook live-chat bridge connection settings described in the Agent Portal documentation, just made reachable from here as well so you don't have to go find it elsewhere.

Legacy Audio Conferencing (Separate from UCBC Meet)#

Before UCBC Meet existed, this platform offered phone-dial-in-only audio conferencing. It's unrelated to UCBC Meet's video rooms, but still works if you rely on it — reachable from the Conferences area, alongside Call Artifacts/Call Ops.

How to Set Up a Conference Room#

1. Create a Conference Center first (a Name, Extension people dial to reach it, Description, Greeting, and PIN Length) — a Conference Center must exist before you can add any rooms to it.
2. Go to Conference Rooms and click Add.
3. Choose the Conference Center this room belongs to.
4. Enter a Room Name, and set a Moderator PIN and Participant PIN (or generate one automatically) — callers enter the matching PIN to join as a moderator or a regular participant.
5. Choose a Profile (audio quality/behavior settings) and a Max Members limit.
6. Optionally set a Start/Stop date-time to schedule the room, Wait for Moderator so participants hold until a moderator joins, and whether the Moderator Ending the Call ends the conference for everyone.
7. Choose whether to Announce Name, Announce Recording, Announce Count, play Sounds, start everyone Muted, or automatically Record the call.
8. Click Save.

In-Call Touch-Tone (DTMF) Controls#

Once connected to a legacy audio conference, callers can use their phone's keypad for quick controls. The exact digits are configurable per Conference Control set, but the default layout is:

Conference Profiles and Conference Controls are where these behaviors and key mappings can be customized if the defaults don't fit how your organization runs calls.

Field Reference#

Meeting (Meet Now / Schedule Meeting)#

Meet Transcription Settings#

Conference Room (Legacy Audio Conferencing)#

Tips & Common Issues#

• A shared meeting link always works for guests with no UCBC login at all — that's by design, so external participants never need an account.
• Only the actual creator of a meeting is treated as host/moderator when joining; if you need someone else to run the meeting, promote them to co-host once they're in, or have them create the meeting themselves.
• Restarting the meeting service (required after changing Meet Transcription settings) drops every meeting running anywhere on the system at that moment — schedule this for a quiet period.
• Local recording saves the file to the recording participant's own device when they stop recording — there is no central copy on the server unless cloud recording was used instead.
• The Live Chat Bridge only does anything once a live stream to YouTube or Facebook is actually running, and its connection credentials are set up from the Agent Portal, not from the Meet page itself.
• Legacy audio conference rooms require a Conference Center to exist first — if "Add" is unavailable or asks you to create one, set up a Conference Center before trying to add a Room.