| Hi, What an interesting subject you decided to write about. I happen to work in the IP-telephony space, so it's refreshing to see the perspective on this subject from the user's standpoint. We do alot of voice conferencing at work for our meetings, so I have experience with the different areas you described. Using the conference button on the phone is definitely the most convenient when you just want to bring in another party into your conversation, but it's not as convenient when you want to setup a meeting for numerous parties. First you have to get all their phone numbers, and then you have to call them when they are available. Like you said, most PBX's support transfer and conference on their phones. The different companies and PBX's you mentioned, are any of them IP based? I'm curious to hear what PBX's are used by large companies in China. Which brings us to meeting place. Meeting place uses the paradigm of real meetings, which is participants can join whenever they feel like it. So you publish the meeting ID, much like you tell everybody the meeting room, and then people can join at their own leisure. You mentioned that there is a set time and duration. Similar to conference rooms, there is a limit of the resources on the system. Without reserving a set time and duration, it would be impossible for the system to know if it has enough resources to handle all the participants. Another thing to mention, is that many systems charge corporations by the time they spend. So companies really just pay for whatever time they use on the system. And logically this leads to the reservationless conferences. This is analogous to having your own private chat room, where people can just join whenever they want, always going to the same location. The only limitation of this is the server has less control over resource usage. So it might be possible that when the server's limit is reached, additional participants cannot join. This might not be a problem for regular chat rooms, but for important meetings, this can be a huge problem. So to avoid this, you would need additional resources on the server side to handle extra load. |
Reversationless Conference Call