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Cisco Conference Now Connects Participants and Accelerates Business Collaboration

Tony Cuevas

Over 85 percent of all meetings require remote attendees to join digitally because they simply cannot be present physically. Satisfy the growing collaboration goals and trends of your business users with the new Conference Now feature available in Cisco Unified Communications Manager.

Tony: Hello? Am I the only one on?

Automated Attendant: You are the first participant. Please continue to hold until the host has arrived.

While I wait for others to join the call, I will enjoy this soothing hold music (some kind of jazz techno fusion) and blog a bit.

Let me begin by asking you a question:

When was the last time you attended an on-site meeting with more than a handful of participants who were all seated and present physically in the same room with no one else on a remote connection?

I imagine it’s been quite some time, or doesn’t happen very often.

According to research by Verizon and estimates published in the Journal of Management Information Systems, the average employee spends over one-third of their work time in meetings. In the U.S. alone, the national average is eleven million meetings per day. And unless your company is able to provide cars, jets, and helicopters, it is likely, and often preferred, to attend remotely.

Estimates vary, but as many as 85 percent of all meetings involve some form of conferencing bridge or remote participant option. Whether it’s web, video, tele, data, VoIP, or a conference call, there is some form of conferencing taking place to allow a group of participants in multiple locations to share a common meeting experience.

Collaboration in the Global Digital Economy

Talented contributors, managers, customers, vendors, partners, and stakeholders are simply not available at the same location and at the same time. They span work locations, office buildings, cities, time zones, and even entire continents.

As a core component of your enterprise collaboration strategy, conferencing plays an important pivotal role. The success of your product portfolio depends upon your project teams working together to accomplish their goals. A weak conferencing platform can actually magnify traditional barriers to effective team communication including poor audio quality, low volume levels, screen sharing or video playback issues, and live-action camera details such as lighting, angles, and zoom.

We are all familiar with what I call the power houses of conferencing—WebEx, Spark, Meeting Server, Acano, Telepresence, LogMeIn (formerly GoToMeeting), and Skype. However, let’s focus on a common real-world user scenario. Sometimes we just need to initiate a quick audio conference call.

For example, a business user often needs a way to initiate a quick 15-minute meeting which doesn’t require a video unit or a smartphone app. Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) really shines in this example. CUCM does conferencing natively for 10+ participants right out of the box.

Meet-Me

As an option, (although I don’t recommend it for the reasons you are about to discover) you could still use the older Meet-Me conferencing feature, which has been around for over a decade. Depending on the capabilities of your software/hardware conference bridge, as many as 128 participants can join a Meet-Me conference.

The host can choose a directory number and offer it to members of a group. Invited users call the directory number to join the conference. Anyone who calls the directory number while the conference is active joins the conference.

For most users, this simplicity is ideal; however, for others, it represents a serious design flaw because sometimes unwanted guests could join a conference call without authorization in the form of an access code or meeting pin number. In a similar manner, users could join the wrong conference because it overlapped with another conference scheduled to start at the same time as one that was running over. Imagine walking in and sitting down for an intro-level Economics class and then slowly realizing that you are in Advanced Chemistry. Yikes!

While you can still find it in release 11.0 of CUCM, the old Meet-Me conference feature didn’t meet the audio conferencing and security needs of many organizations. VoIP hacking patches were applied like bandages with complicated Cisco Contact Express (UCCX) scripts. It also lacked a more modern look and feel, particularly in its conference menu controls.

For these reasons, business users were switching from Meet-Me to WebEx over the past decade.

Conference Now

Cisco has also resolved those legacy pain points by introducing a new collaboration feature called Conference Now, with no extra licensing required. The Conference Now feature is standard in CUCM starting from release 11.0. Industry analysts agree that the feature represents a significant enhancement to the CUCM platform and really helps Cisco to strongly compete with other audio conferencing bridges in the market.

Conference Now includes a standard single meeting phone number and supports the simultaneous hosting of multiple meetings without the risk of joining the wrong meeting. As an option, a host can also choose their own attendee access codes without having to place a ticket and wait for an IT administrator to configure attendee meeting access. A lobby room feature allows participants to listen to music on hold while they wait for the host to start the meeting.

Example: Using Conference Now

Here’s how your organization might enjoy an improved Conference Now collaboration experience:

  1. Administrators configure the Conference Now interactive voice response (IVR) directory.
  2. A host schedules a meeting. Each self-service user ID is used as the meeting number for each conference; typically, it is the same as the user’s primary phone extension.
  3. The host provides the meeting number, time slot, and standard attendee access code to all the participants. For added security, the host can set a new attendee access code.
  4. The host enters the meeting number and their secure pin code to start the conference.
  5. A conference bridge is allocated based on the host media resource group list (MRGL).
  6. Each participant places a call to a centralized conference assistant number in the directory. This number is typically toll-free and easy to remember or added to a speed dial feature.
  7. An IVR application plays a series of prompts to guide the caller to join the conference. If any participants call into the meeting before the host, they hear hold music.

The entire solution is easy for administrators to configure. The following screen image shows the attractive user interface:

My advice for collaboration engineers out there getting tangled in the growing web of products is to take a step back and keep it simple. Conference Now is efficient, effective, and best of all, it is easy to configure and implement.

Until next time… you can catch me on Spark!

Cuevas Out!

Tony Cuevas

Tony Cuevas, Practice Lead, Collaboration and Network, CDI Southeast

Tony Cuevas, Practice Lead, Collaboration & Network, is CDI Southeast’s resident Captain of Collaboration. As a practice lead, he has successfully lead account managers in reinforcing existing relationships and strategically widened the foundation of business, leading to an increase of existing clients. This role required continual application of strategic technical knowledge, and the ability to act as a leader and mentor in a highly competitive sales environment. He specializes in many of today’s leading technologies such as: Cisco Unified Communications Manager, Cisco Unity Connection, Cisco Contact Center Express, Cisco IM and Presence, Cisco WebEx, Cisco Spark, Cisco Network Infrastructure, Cisco Meraki and VMware NSX. Tony attended Pennsylvania State University and joined CDI Southeast in 2012. In his spare time, he enjoys traveling, hiking, sports, and being active with his wife and three children.