This project came about through the need to service customer requests manually for a Sonic Foundry Mediasite system. The Mediasite system allows the capturing of video, audio and slides for lectures, presentations and events and is one of the leading solutions in the market for this purpose. Unfortunately the process of scheduling a recording is very manual, so I set about creating an integration with the ServiceNow platform and ultimately creating a self service catalogue item, enabling end users to book their own recordings with little involvement from the IT function.

Requirements

• Mediasite Recorder Discovery
• Mediasite Templates Discovery
• Dynamic Service Catalogue Item
• Automatic creation of recording schedules submitted by end users
• Mediasite Recorder monitoring

Mediasite Discovery

To aide in the usability of the integration, I decided to automatically discovery new Mediasite Recorders on a daily basis, this way if a new recorder was added to the Mediasite Server, the relevant parties would be notified, along with instructions for the setup of the recorder in the ServiceNow platform. The recorder was only to be available to end users once the setup was complete on the platform.

Mediasite uses templates to define how recorders capture and serve content, not all recorders are capable of the same things, so in the ServiceNow platform, templates must be assigned to a recorder so that the dynamic Service Catalogue item knows how to handle a specific recorder and what to offer to an end user who wants to schedule a recording.

As well assigning a template(s) to a recorder when it is discovered, the ITIL user setting up the recorder must also provide a “friendly” name for the recorder, this name is customer visible on the Catalogue Item. As soon as it has this “friendly” name it will be in live service, and without any changes to the catalogue item, it will be available to end users to schedule recordings with.

Automatic Schedule Creation

The communication with the Mediasite System is via a RESTful API. this is implemented in the ServiceNow platform as Script Include, this makes it incredibly easy and efficient to work with in the ServiceNow platform and makes further development easy, as the most common functions/endpoints in the RESTful API provided by Sonic Foundry are easy to get access to simply by including the Script Include in any new scripts. In this case a section of the Script Include contains a specific function to take the details of the variables in the Request Item (RITM) and transform that into 5 separate API calls to the Mediasite Server which creates the Schedule. The result of this is that the Workflow for the Request Item other than an approval process, contains a script with just two lines of code to fulfil the request.

Mediasite Recorder Monitoring

Any system, no matter how robust, have their issues, so I decided that it would be a good idea to implement an early warning system for the Mediasite Recorders. This early warning system looks at the upcoming scheduled recordings, if a recording is scheduled to take place in the next 45 minutes, the recorder it is scheduled for will be tested for connectivity. If the recorder is deemed to be offline an incident will be automatically created for a member of the Audio Visual Services team to investigate. The recorder will be checked every 5 minutes until the recording starts to determine if the recorder is online. Once it has been discovered to be online, the Incident will be resolved automatically and the Audio Visual Services personnel involved in the resolution will add notes to the Incident detailing the root cause/issue.

If you would like any further details on this integration, please contact me.