Product · Meetings & calling
Video meetings and
business telephony.
Video and audio meetings with screen sharing and calendar invitations, plus SIP-based business calling with extensions, call routing, queues and voicemail — run on media servers the organization controls.
Project status Meetings are planned for the collaboration phase and telephony for the hardening and expansion phase. LiveKit, MatrixRTC and FreeSWITCH are candidates under evaluation; nothing on this page is available yet.
What it replaces
Teams meetings and Teams Phone, Google Meet, and the separate phone system many businesses still run.
Meetings and calls are the most demanding workloads in the platform. Mail can arrive a few seconds late without anyone noticing; a video call cannot. Audio and video have to travel between participants with very little delay, adapt to poor connections, and keep working when twenty people join at once from home broadband, mobile networks and office firewalls.
Office Unbound plans two related services. Meetings covers video and audio meetings in the browser and the platform’s applications, with screen sharing, guests, host controls and invitations from the calendar. Business calling covers the phone system: extensions, softphones and desk phones, call routing, queues, voicemail and connection to the public telephone network through a SIP provider.
Both are built on established open-source real-time media software. The Office Unbound work is integration: signing in with the same identity, scheduling from the same calendar, starting a call from a chat room, and administering it all from the same console.
Meetings
What the meeting service is being designed to provide. None of it is available yet.
- Available Available and verified in a release
- In development Being built now
- Planned In the roadmap, not yet started
- Under evaluation Being assessed; not yet selected
| Capability | What it means | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Video meetings | Multi-party video in the browser and in desktop and mobile applications. | Planned |
| Audio meetings and group calling | Voice-only meetings and quick calls started from a chat room. | Planned |
| Screen sharing | Sharing a screen or a single window with participants. | Planned |
| Calendar-integrated invitations | A join link created with the calendar event and sent with the invitation. | Planned |
| Guest access | External participants joining by link from a browser, without an account. | Planned |
| Host controls | Muting, removing participants, locking a meeting and admitting people from a lobby. | Planned |
| Participant permissions | Who may present, unmute, share screens or record, set per meeting or by policy. | Planned |
| Meeting administration | Organization-wide defaults, guest policy and usage reporting. | Planned |
| Recording | Recording where supported, authorized by policy and announced to participants. | Planned |
| Secure communications | Encrypted media in transit; end-to-end encryption where the chosen components support it. | Under evaluation |
How a meeting is intended to work
Scheduled in the calendar
Creating a meeting in the calendar adds a join link to the event, so internal and external attendees receive it in an ordinary invitation.
Joined from anywhere
Colleagues join with their platform sign-in; guests join from a browser, subject to the organization’s guest policy and the host’s lobby.
Routed through a media server
Each participant sends audio and video once to a selective forwarding unit, which passes the right streams to everyone else at the quality each connection can take.
Connected to the team
A meeting can have a chat room before and after it, and files shared during the meeting go to that room’s storage.
Recorded only when authorized
Where recording is enabled by policy and started by a permitted person, participants are told, and the recording is stored with defined access and retention.
Candidate technology
LiveKit is an open-source WebRTC media server built around a selective forwarding unit (SFU). An SFU forwards streams rather than mixing them, which keeps server load lower and lets each participant receive what their connection can handle.
MatrixRTC is the Matrix approach to calls and meetings, in which a Matrix room coordinates who is in a call and a media backend such as LiveKit carries the audio and video. Using it would tie meetings naturally to the chat rooms described on the collaboration page.
Both are Under evaluation. Evaluation covers call quality under loss and jitter, behavior behind restrictive firewalls, recording, scaling, client support and licensing.
Capacity depends on deployment
No participant limit is published, because none can be honest without knowing where and how the service runs.
Meeting size and quality are not properties of the software alone. They depend on the deployment architecture, hardware resources, network capacity and media configuration. The same software can handle a large meeting comfortably on one installation and struggle with a small one on another.
| Factor | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Network bandwidth | Every participant’s video passes through the media server. Upstream and downstream capacity at the server’s location is usually the first limit reached. |
| Media server resources | CPU and memory for forwarding streams, and considerably more if recording or transcoding is enabled. |
| Server placement | Latency grows with distance between participants and the media server; a server near most users gives better calls. |
| Firewall traversal | Participants behind restrictive networks may need relayed media (TURN), which adds load and latency. |
| Media configuration | Resolution limits, simulcast and how many video tiles are shown at once change bandwidth use substantially. |
| Scaling design | Larger deployments may need several media servers; that design is part of capacity planning, not a default. |
Deployment guidance will describe tested configurations once there are test results to describe. Until then, any figure would be invented.
Business calling
A phone system for the organization, integrated with the rest of the platform, using SIP — the standard that most business telephony already runs on.
| Capability | What it means | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Business calling | Inbound and outbound calls on the organization’s phone numbers. | Planned |
| Extensions | Internal extension numbers per person, team or room. | Planned |
| Softphones | Calling from the desktop and mobile applications and the browser. | Planned |
| SIP desk phones | Standards-based desk phones registered to the platform, subject to device testing. | Planned |
| Call routing | Time-of-day rules, auto attendants and forwarding. | Planned |
| Call queues | Calls distributed across a team, such as reception or support. | Planned |
| Voicemail | Per-user and shared voicemail, with delivery to the mailbox. | Planned |
| SIP connectivity | SIP trunks to telephone carriers for access to the public network. | Planned |
| PBX integration | Connection to an existing PBX during a phased transition. | Planned |
| PSTN provider integration | Configuration for carriers the organization chooses. | Planned |
| Telephony engine | FreeSWITCH and supporting SIP/WebRTC components. | Under evaluation |
How telephony connects
A telephony engine such as FreeSWITCH acts as the organization’s PBX: it registers extensions, applies routing rules, runs queues and stores voicemail. Calls to and from ordinary phone numbers pass through a SIP trunk to a telephone carrier. Softphones in the platform’s applications use WebRTC or SIP to reach the PBX; SIP desk phones register directly.
Because the carrier connection is standard SIP, an organization can choose its carrier, keep its numbers where porting rules allow, and change carrier later without replacing the phone system.
Office Unbound does not provide phone numbers or call minutes. Connection to the public telephone network requires a telephony provider, chosen by the organization or its MSP, whose numbers, call charges, emergency-calling obligations and regulatory requirements are separate from Office Unbound and vary by country.
Telephony is in the hardening and expansion phase because it carries obligations — emergency calling, number porting, call quality — that should rest on a stable core platform. A phased transition from an existing PBX is part of the plan.
What we are not claiming
Office Unbound does not claim parity with Teams meetings, Teams Phone or Google Meet, which are mature services backed by global networks of media servers. A self-hosted or MSP-hosted service runs where its operator puts it, and its quality is bounded by that infrastructure. Features such as live captions, transcription, breakout rooms, webinars and large broadcast events are not in the capability lists above and are not promised.
Meeting recordings held in Teams or Google Meet are not presented as migratable. Where source APIs allow recordings to be exported as files, they can be moved as files; that is the extent of the expectation.
Replacing meetings or a phone system?
Tell us how many people meet at once, where they are, and what your telephony looks like today. It shapes how capacity and calling are tested.