7. Audio/Video Conferencing:
What’s New in IP Conferencing Solutions

Nowadays, you cannot imagine a geographically spread company without an audio-conference system, which have become more and more important even for smaller companies.

Today, these systems are built using the IP-protocol and that has several decisive advantages over the conferencing solutions for traditional phone systems:

• You can plug a video-camera into the system and do what analogue phone systems don't allow you to do.
• With you use an IP network for data transfer, it is not just a phone network - all you need to start a conference call is a connection to the IP-network or access to the internet.
• An IP-based conferencing system complements enterprise IP-network services, like e-mail, intranet, web-portals, ERP and CRM systems. So, the conferencing service is available right at your workplace, without going to a specially equipped meeting room.
• Your system administrator can maintain and administer your conferencing system remotely.
• With IP based conferencing software, you can share documents, record conference session recordings, communicate via a text chat, etc.
• You do not need special technical skills to plan a meeting, invite participants and manage the conference session.
• You can participate in the conference using any VoIP communication tool – an IP phone, Skype, an SIP phone etc. The only limit is the number of concurrent users.

What Professional Conferencing Solutions Can Do

The operators’ interface of an operator-assisted conferencing solution

Any IP telephony system allows you to launch a “simple” audio-conference. You simply assign a phone number for the conference session and anyone who dials it gets connected to the meeting, when everyone can hear everyone. If someone is outside your office, then a caller might need to dial a conference extension to get connected.

But, when you want dozens or even hundreds of people to be on air at the same time, more sophisticated professional systems come at play. Let's see what you need to remember, if you ever face such challenge:

Voice Arbitration

One of the key professional conference-system parameters is the number of full-duplex users, who can both listen to the call and speak up. However, if you hold a conference with, say, 100 people and all of them are full-duplex, then you run a risk of disrupting it. Why? Because sounds (not only voice of a speaker, but various background sounds as well) from 100 phones get in at the same time. That's why it makes sense to manage full-duplex users at a time with voice arbitration, which is a set of algorithms that manage “voice-rights” of conference participants.

Conference Moderation

The purpose of conference moderation is to grant a possibility to speak out. When you have several dozens of users in a conference, which is not moderated, any moot point will turn the session into a chaos with no one listening. To avoid that, you must have a conference operator interface that manages each participant by endowing or barring the right to speak.

System Cascading

With system cascading, you can setup several distributed conferencing units that can all be managed centrally using the conferencing software deployed at the headquarters. For example, if your company has several remote offices and your conference sessions can hold 5-10 employees from each office, you can deploy the cascaded conferencing software in each office and integrate them into the headquarters conferencing system. This will significantly reduce the requirement to IP network capacity and cut costs for the conferencing IP traffic.

Background Noise

If your conference participants have to communicate at places with significant background noise (like noisy streets, airports, concert halls and so on), then there's a risk that they will not be heard by others. Apart from moderating the conference as described above, you can also use a noise reduction system that separates and suppresses any disordered noise.

Conference Automation

When you hold conferences with a lot of people regularly, conference automation will help you to automatically invite the participants to the meeting and reconnect them in the case the connection is lost.

Other Audio/Video Conferencing Features

In addition to the above-mentioned benefits, you might do more with professional conferencing software:

• record a conference session and manage the records repository,
• generate reports on each participant time of presence and activity level,
• organize polling among conference participants,
• create private “chat-rooms” for a limited number of callers,
• secure access (with a login and password) to desired conference types,
• share the documents, desktop and so on.

Audio/Video Conference Software Integration

To streamline the conferencing processes, you can integrate the conferencing software with your enterprise applications:

• integration with a CRM system (or any other client database) will allow you to launch audio conferences using the CRM software interface;
• integration with your groupware solution will allow your employees to plan the conference in groupware (date, time, participants); this data will then go to the conferencing software, which will connect all the participants on the defined date and time; the same approach is applicable for other collaboration software, for example, e-learning – a coach can use e-learning software to plan an audio-conference as a part of his educational program;
• integration with a directory service (LDAP/AD) will provide the conferencing software with the up to date list of employees.

You can also integrate conferencing software with 3rd party web-conferencing solutions to participate in web-conferences by simply using your IP phone. When a web-conference starts, the system just places a call to your IP phone to invite you to the conference.

For example, such integration is performed by Cisco – after acquiring the WebEx, Cisco integrated it with Cisco Unified MeetingPlace to combine the on-premise voice conferencing with web-conferencing.

So, if your employees use web-conferencing software, it’s a good idea to consider integrating it with your IP-telephony network.

Audio/Video Conference Software Vendors

The conferencing software for IP-telephony networks is offered by both IP-telephony vendors and a number of 3rd party companies, which develop their conferencing solutions and integrate them with other IP-telephony systems.

• 3Com IP Conferencing by 3Com
• Avaya Unified Conferencing by Avaya
• Cisco Unified Meeting Place by Cisco
• Converge Pro products by ClearOne
• Converged Conferencing by ShoreTel
• Indigo ICS by Indigo
• Polycom Voice Conferencing Solutions by Polycom

What to Do Next

Basically, there are 2 types of conferencing solutions:

• conferencing software for small workgroups and project teams,
• solutions for large meetings in distributed enterprises.

Here’s how you can select a VoIP conferencing solution:

• examine the functionality required by your business needs,
• choose the software that supports your IP telephony network components,
• consider the bandwidth you need,
• pay attention to scalability and cascading,
• think in advance about integration issues,
• examine the API, if you need custom modules to extend the functionality.

Read the next chapter: 8. Presence Service - Reach Your Party with a Single Phone Call

Comments: