Description
Traditionally, business meetings required all participants to be in the same room at the same time. Conference calls let a meeting coordinator manually call each participant and individually add him/her to the meeting; while this resolves potential travel and scheduling issues, it also adds confusion and delays, lowering overall efficiency and engagement among meeting participants. More recently, conference bridge solutions have allowed creation of a predefined conference into which participants can call at a predefined time to be connected to the conference. Although these solutions maximize productivity, engagement, and ease-of-use, they also can be costly. With the IP Server 900, ESI has aimed to provide many of the benefits of a large conference bridge at a much lower price tag and without adding extra hardware to the phone closet. The IP Server 900’s “meet-me” conferencing feature does just that, by allowing your customers to remotely assemble through the use of the IP Server 900’s builtin conference bridges. “Meet-me” conferencing is an optional, licensed feature in the IP Server 900 that allows you to turn on up to four conference bridges for your customer (each bridge allows up to 16 simultaneous participants; the total number of simultaneous participants across all enabled conference bridges on the system may not exceed 31). This allows your customers to reduce or, in many cases, eliminate the need for — and reliance on — third-party conference bridge solutions. To increase security on the bridges, the system allows a password to be set for each bridge, and also asks each participant to record his/her name when calling in so the participant can be announced to the conference.
Configuration
Once licenses have been enabled, “meet-me” conference bridges require no action on your part to set up the bridge, although you can optionally assign to the bridge a password that participants must enter before being allowed to join the conference. The password can be created, edited, or removed by either the System Administrator or the Installer. “Meet-me” conference bridge passwords are programmed by logging into them as one would log into programming of any group or info mailbox:
- 1. Press PROG/HELP (or PROGRAM on a 48-Key Feature Phone) and then ????.
- 2. Dial the conference bridge extension number.
- 3. Dial either the Installer or Administrator password.
- 4. The OWNER PW field is for future use and should be left at its default value of 0; press # to skip this field.
- 5. The PARTICIPANT PW field sets the password that participants must use to log into the “meet-me” conference bridge. The default value of 0 disables the password so users won’t be prompted. The password must be numeric and can be up to 16 digits in length.
