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www.voip-news.comBy Robert Poe
Commercial hosted audio-conferencing services are convenient and valuable. They're simple to use: just dial a number and enter a passcode. They're also helpful when several people are participating, and when conferencing needs are too unpredictable to handle in-house.
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But conference calling through on-premises telephony equipment can also have advantages. For one thing, it does not require payment every time more than three people want to talk. For another, it can provide more control over the experience.
Zeacom's New Audio-Conferencing Application
The latest version of Zeacom Ltd.'s unified-communications software, Communications Center 5.0, provides such in-house conferencing capabilities. The software runs on servers connected to SMB-oriented PBXes from Avaya Inc., Cisco Systems Inc. and NEC Global. Communications Center 5.0 works through the PBXes to provide such applications and functions as presence detection, contact centers, operator consoles, voice mail and more.
The conferencing application, which was not available in previous versions of Zeacom's unified-communications software, allows calls with up to 64 participants. Users can preschedule conferences or create them on-the-fly. The latter requires merely checking the presence availability of potential participants on-screen, then dragging and dropping their names into the conference area. They then receive a screen pop-up inviting them to join the call. Participants can also receive an automated call with a spoken invitation. Invitations to hosted conferences, by contrast, typically involve little more than emails containing the applicable phone number and passcode.
Similarly, Zeacom's conferencing application can confirm exactly who's on a call. It plays the recorded names of people entering and exiting the conference, and the phone numbers of those it does not recognize. Hosted services, on the other hand, may merely play a sound to indicate that someone has joined or left. In many cases that is not enough, claimed Zeacom vice president of sales Brady Cox. "Sometimes on a high-level confidential call, we hear a ping because someone has entered or left the conference," he explained. "The CEO says 'Who was that?' So we do a count, and we're all here. But because we heard the ping, we all have to get off and come on again."
The application also allows those in charge to lower or mute any caller's voice. It lets moderators click and drag some participants into smaller conferences separate from the main one, and then bring them back. And the application allows those in charge to reactivate previous or "historical" conferences with the same participants.
Of course, most IP PBXes offer greater or lesser conference-calling capabilities with graphical controls as well. Zeacom, however, claims its server-based approach gives it an additional advantage. While typical PBXes use separate interfaces and methods to manage various applications such as conferencing, contact centers and voice mail, Zeacom makes it possible to operate all such applications through a single graphical interface. "That's a very strong value proposition for a customer," said Cox. "They can learn this one thing, have one training course, [and] one administration interface to control their entire application layer."
Future Integration Plans
Zeacom plans to integrate its product with commercial Web-conferencing services, which let users share whiteboards and slides, as well as control each other's PCs online. Such services' audio controls are usually as basic as those of audio-only conferencing. The integration will allow Zeacom to handle the audio portion of the service, Cox said, giving users significantly more control.
Now, if they can just find a way to visually "mute" boring PowerPoint presentations.
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