Joining and running a video meeting

A meeting with a link opens in your browser. There is nothing to install, and anybody holding the link can come, whether or not they have an account here.

1. Open the link, from the Join button on a chip, from Join in the event dialog, from the Join box at the top of Calendar if somebody sent you the link or read you the code, or straight from the message they sent it in. It opens in its own tab.
2. If you are signed in to Certainty the meeting knows you already. Anybody else is asked for a name first, under “You have been invited to”, with the host named underneath. The help line says what the name is for, “This is what everyone in the meeting will see”, and Continue carries on. A colleague who has arrived as a guest by accident is offered Sign in on the same card.
3. Next is the “Before you join” screen: a mirrored preview of your camera, a meter that moves when your microphone hears you, and a Microphone and a Camera switch. The browser is asked for both the moment that screen appears rather than when you press a button, and while the answer is outstanding a quiet line says so. Once permission is granted a picker appears for each device you have more than one of.
4. If the browser refuses, a note appears saying what happened and what to do about it, and it says which refusal it was: permission was declined, no camera or microphone was found, or another application is holding one. Try again asks again from inside your click, which is what an iPhone insists on. Or take the Join without camera and microphone door underneath, which is a real way in rather than a dead end.
5. Click Join now if you are on the team, or Ask to join if you are not. Under both buttons, before anybody has pressed anything, sits the line “The host can record this meeting. You will see a notice on screen if they do.”

A guest then waits on a card reading Waiting to be let in, with the same small preview so a badly lit camera is their own discovery rather than a surprise on arrival, and a line saying whether they are arriving with a camera, a microphone, both or neither. After half a minute the card starts counting the wait, and Knock again nudges the room, no more often than once every thirty seconds, with the button counting down the rest. After five minutes it stops pretending somebody is about to click and says the host may not be at their screen. Leave closes it. If nobody lets them in, the card reads “You were not let in” and points them back at whoever invited them.

Anybody on the team who is in the call can open the door. A card in the bottom corner headed Waiting to be let in lists who is there, each with Let in and Not now beside them, and a Let everyone in button appears once more than two people are queued. A new arrival also raises one message in the corner saying they are waiting, with Let in on it, because a host looking at a shared screen will not notice a card.

6. In the call, everybody has a tile: their name, a glyph when they are muted, their initials when the camera is off, and a ring while they are talking. Your own tile comes first. The heading counts the room, and the tiles rearrange themselves as it fills. Once there are more people than fit on the stage, it shows a page at a time, twelve tiles on a computer and six on a phone, ordered you first, then whoever is sharing, then whoever spoke most recently, then everybody else by name. Arrows and a count like 2 of 4 sit under the stage, and a sideways swipe turns the page on a touch screen. Only the people on the page in front of you have their camera pulled, which is what keeps a phone usable in a meeting of fifty.
7. The controls sit along the bottom: Mute and Unmute, Stop video and Start video, Share and Stop sharing, Record for whoever set the meeting up, Chat, and Leave. That same person also gets End for everyone.
8. The keyboard does the same things: m for the microphone, v for the camera, c for the chat, s for sharing, and Esc closes whatever is open. Hold the space bar to talk while muted and let go to go quiet again, which is the line printed under the bar. None of them fire while you are typing a message, and recording has no shortcut on purpose.
9. Share hands your screen to the room, and the shared screen takes the stage while the tiles drop into a strip. One screen is on the stage at a time, but it can change hands: press Share while somebody else is sharing and the bar asks Replace Farah’s screen?, with Keep theirs and Replace beside it. Confirm and their share stops, yours takes the stage, and they are told who took it over. Where the host has turned sharing off for you, the control stays there and says so instead. On a phone it is there but greyed, reading “Screen sharing is not available on this device”, because a phone browser has no screen picker to offer.
10. Chat opens the panel beside the call. Enter sends and Shift and Enter start a new line. A line that could not be sent keeps its bubble, says Not sent and offers Retry, and the button carries a dot for messages you have not read yet. Messages are kept: for a team member the panel backfills what was said before they opened it, and the whole conversation is still there after the meeting. A guest is told that the messages from before they joined are not shown, because a guest has nowhere to read them.
11. If your browser refuses to make a sound until you touch the page, a Tap to turn on sound button appears over the call. One click is all it wants.

Nothing is ever recorded on its own. Only the person who set the meeting up can start a recording, and only while signed in, in a browser that can record, in a meeting that is running: where any of that is untrue the control is simply not there. The button reads Record, then Starting, then Stop with a clock and how much has been saved so far, and finally Finishing with the parts still to go. A line beside the meeting title reminds that person, and only that person, to keep the tab open while it runs, because their browser is the thing doing the recording.

While one is running everybody in the call sees the Recording notice at the top of the screen, with the name of whoever started it, and a red dot in the header that stays there for as long as it lasts. Guests see it too. A recording stops itself at two hours, or sooner if the connection cannot keep up, and says so rather than failing quietly. If the upload breaks partway, what had already been saved is kept: the file is shorter than the meeting, every second in it is real, and the message says it is on the meeting page. Only a recording that never got that far saves nothing.

Leave takes you out and leaves the meeting running. End for everyone asks “End the meeting for everyone?” in the bar itself, with Keep it open and End it, and closes the room for everybody. A meeting also ends on its own five minutes after the last person has gone, and no meeting runs longer than twelve hours. Once it has ended the link stops working, which is by design: a shared link is not a standing door. The last screen says which of those endings it was, and a team member is told the transcript was kept and gets Open the meeting page to go back into Certainty. A guest never does, because there is nothing there they could open.

The link is open to a guest from fifteen minutes before the start time until four hours after it, or any time while the meeting is actually running. Team members can go in whenever they like, and the first one through starts the meeting. Fifty people fit in a call; after that the link answers that the meeting is full. The lobby holds sixty waiting on top of that, and up to ten of them can be knocking from one connection, so a room of guests on the same office wifi is not turned away after the first two.

Afterwards, open the event from Calendar and click Open meeting page. It has a tab for each thing the meeting left behind. Overview carries the description, anybody who was named on the event, the join link while it still works, and Who was there: each person, whether they were a guest, when they joined and how long they stayed, with a line underneath counting the people and the minutes. Chat is the transcript, oldest first, with a separator between one day and the next and Earlier messages at the top for anything older. Recording plays what was recorded, with the length and the size under the player and a Download button beside them. A recording still on its way says it is being prepared and offers Check again, and a meeting nobody recorded says so. Chat and Recording appear for the roles granted meetings, so a role that only reads the calendar sees Overview alone.

One more tab, Sharing, is where a finished meeting’s record is handed to somebody who was not in the room. It appears on any finished meeting, to anyone who can approve project access, and it reaches colleagues and clients alike: search for a person, add them, and decide for that person alone whether they may open the recording, the transcript or the summary. Nothing is shared until somebody switches it on, and clearing all of a person’s switches takes it away again. A client who has been shared with finds the meeting on their own calendar and on their home page, and hears about it by notification and by email. A colleague already reads transcripts and summaries, so for them sharing is what puts the meeting on their calendar and, where that switch is on, opens the recording.