Citrix Publishes API For GoTo Products
Citrix put out a press release today announcing availability of a public API that lets developers make programmatic calls to GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, and GoToTraining. An API (or Application Programming Interface) gives programmers ways to pass information into and out of the Citrix collaboration software so that other systems can work in concert with the conferencing solutions.
Only a few web conferencing vendors have released API calls for use by outside developers. I may accidentally overlook one or two, but offhand I come up with Adobe Connect, Cisco WebEx, omNovia, ReadyTalk, and ON24 (through the use of custom-designed widgets). So Citrix is offering a feature that is still relatively rare. But is it useful?
The answer is yes. The typical end user conducting a webinar, online training session, or team meeting won’t use or care about APIs. But companies wanting more extensive control over their web collaboration can definitely benefit.
One example is the ability to build custom registration pages for an event. If you want people to sign up for classes through your own “shopping cart” catalog, or through a Learning Management System, or through a payment processing site, you may then need to pass their registration into your web conferencing software to allow for proper identity checking and security at login. Or you might want to use the Citrix reminders feature to send automated, scheduled emails to your registrants.
After the web meeting, you might want to extract information on who attended and how long they spent in session, feeding that information to your Customer Relationship Management software or your Sales Force Automation system. If you do a lot of events, it’s easier and more reliable to make these connections automatic than to force an administrator to run reports and upload spreadsheet data into the external system.
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