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Citrix’s popular online collaboration products (GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar) now offer an open API to third party developers. The software was previously closed, with the exception of a handful of premier partners and large corporate customers. By opening its platform to the development community, Citrix is likely to see a new wave of innovation with its products.
The APIs offer a world of possibilities to companies. Imagine being able to integrate GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar data into your CRM or website. You could customize and personalize your web meeting invitations. Once somebody registered for your meeting or webinar, you could automatically perform some action in your CRM software.
Citrix will be offering two sets of APIs for the GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar platforms. The first is an Administrator/Reporting API, the second is an Organizer API. Rather than go over the technical details, which are already covered in-depth on the Citrix developer website, let’s review some of the possibilities offered by these new APIs.
Possibilities with the Administrator/Reporting API
One of the problems with many software as a service (SAAS) vendors is that all of your precious data lives in their cloud (not yours). If you ever cancel, change, or upgrade the service, all that data is lost. Furthermore, you’re limited to the applications internal sorting and filtering features, which in many cases is very limited.
One of the biggest benefits of the new GoToMeeting Reporting API is the ability to pull GoToMeeting reports into your own system. Storing the data in your cloud allows you to sort, filter and graph the data any way you like.
You can also run queries to get meeting and attendee information by organizer. This may be helpful to determine the productivity of your sales, service, or training staff. You can also use this data to optimize your meetings. You could determine what day of the week, or time of day has the best attendance. You can run reports to see what presentations had the highest level of engagement. These are just a few basic ideas.
Possibilities with the Organizer API
GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar have always had basic Outlook and mail client integration for sending out invitations, but one of the features I’ve missed is calendar integration for scheduling meetings.
With the new API, you could write a basic application that integrates with your calendaring or scheduling system, which can prevent you from overlapping meetings, or scheduling them too close.
The real excitement comes from the potential to integrate GoToMeeting with your company CRM. Imagine being able to scrape the list of attendees from your last meeting, and adding them to your mailing list automatically. You could add each customer’s attendance to their profile. This could help you analyze your customers participation and engagement.
Summary and Resources
I’ve just scratched the surface in this post. I’m sure the best applications haven’t even been conceived yet. These APIs make GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar more attractive to developers who are looking for seamless online meetings.