Issue Launching the Live Meeting Client for Hosted Live Meetings

On a desktop I use regularly, I had a nagging Live Meeting issue when trying to attend a hosted Live Meeting. After clicking the “Join Meeting” link I received the following error:

I had always assumed the root cause was that the Live Meeting client was getting confused (configuration) between on-premise and  hosted live meetings because I use the same client to attend both. BTW, I good tip - if the meeting URL starts with “meet:”  it is an on-premise OCS server hosting the meeting, and if it starts with a “https:” it is a hosted live meeting.

I dug into the issue, found the problem, fixed it, and wanted to share my experience for the benefit of others.

The fixed turned out to be an Internet Explorer setting (see KB article: You are prompted to open or to save a file that is named “Launch.rtc” when you try to join a meeting in Live Meeting 2007).  This article discusses many causes for this error, but after taking the first action (Disable the “Do Not Save Encrypted pages to disk” option in Internet Explorer”) everything worked like a charm.

Here is why several things can go wrong with the launch process for a hosted Live Meeting. When the user clicks on that “Join Meeting” link here is what happens:

1. A URL launches in the browser with the meeting details (e.g. https://www.livemeeting.com/<meeting url, id, and role>).
2. The web site redirects the client to a Microsoft RTC Connection File (i.e. “launch.rtc” file).  The RTC file contains the meeting information (role, meeting start time, end time, etc…)
3. The RTC file is (should be) associated with the program “Microsoft Office Live Meeting Router”.
4. The “Microsoft Office Live Meeting Router” starts the local Live Meeting Console with the information about the meeting from the RTC file.

In general, users can minimize chances of other Live Meeting client issues by running the most up-to-date client.  The new OCS Update Resource Center makes this easier.

Users can also point their browsers at the Inside OCS Client Version Tool to easily see what versions of each client they are running.