Core Features
- A VoIP conferencing platform for conference call providers.
- Reservation-based conferences with or without a Moderator for Business, Business to Business, Non-Profit, and Team conferences.
- Reservation-based Listen Only conferences which is great for press releases, education, training, and promotional events.
- Reservation-less conferences with or without a Moderator, perfect for ad hoc meetings and presentations.
- Reservation-less Listen Only conferences for impromptu announcements, press events, and annual reports
Overview
In today’s global, outsourced economy with scarce resources and a greater awareness to one’s carbon footprint, VoIP conferencing is an ideal way for people to meet and collaborate when face-to-face meetings are not practical, cost-effective or feasible. The VoIP Conferencing Module provides high quality reservation-based and/or reservation-less audio conferencing with integrated billing to the Talking SIP platform. VoIP Conferencing allows your subscribers to join in a multi-party conference in an easy and convenient manner that helps to drive inbound revenue to your network.
Whether you are launching a conference call system or offering it as a value add to another service such as calling card or voice mail, Talking SIP’s VoIP conference call solution is market-ready and packed full of advanced conferencing features and third-party control. Talking SIP’s VoIP conferencing engine supports reservation and reservation-less based conferences with partitioned billing, moderator or peer modes, participant limits, custom branding, custom on-hold music and several announcement and departure notifications. Integrated into the Callback features of Talking SIP and with powerful database and web integrations it supports the creation of web based conferencing portals and conference management to allow attendees to be pulled in to join a conference automatically or by calling a shared or specific access number into the conference.
Talking SIP’s real-time billing engine is tightly integrated into conferencing to provide the ability to set up free conferences or bill for them based on a flat rate, a per minute rate or a varying rate over the length of the conference.
VoIP Conferencing is a prime example of how conference call providers can leverage Talking SIP to draw subscribers into an inbound only service that can help subsidize other more competitive services like prepaid calling card.
Features
The VoIP Conference Module is ready for turnkey deployment. This enhanced service is a full-featured reservation-based and reservation-less conference service that delivers a market ready and highly competitive service offering for next-generation providers.
- Supports ANI, DNIS, IP, remote-party-ID and P-asserted-identity authentication into a conference.
- Supports silence, voice prompt, tone or a recorded name for participant announcement.
- Supports silence or a tone for participant departure.
- Supports several levels of custom branding.
- Option to announce the number of participants in a conference.
Billing & Costing
In the highly competitive long distance market the VoIP Conference Module offers a primarily inbound service that can be used to drive additional revenue to the network or it can act as a loss leader for other services. The VoIP Conference module is fully integrated into Talking SIP’s real-time VoIP Billing engine for by the minute, by the call or free service configurations.
- Real-time billing engine integration.
- Ability to offer free conferencing or bill by the call and/or by the minute as well as vary the cost of the call over the call’s duration.
- Ability to vary the rate based on full or partial ANI/DNIS, access code, and/or based on the time of day, day of week or date range.
- For prepaid accounts you may equalize the prepaid balance over the maximum number of participants for reservation-based conferences.
- Ability to set up billing based on DNIS, device, caller or conference access code.
Integration
The VoIP Conference Module is seamlessly integrated into the other enhanced services of Talking SIP™ to help build customer loyalty while providing a consistent and comprehensive user experience.
- Full integration into Talking SIP™’s Callback Module to allow participants to be called and brought into a conference.
- Full integration into Talking SIP™’s End User Web Interface to allow Conferences to be easily scheduled and managed.
- Interface to allow third-party control (e.g. custom application or web service) to control a conference and/or its participants.
Scalability
The VoIP Conference Module supports both distributed and centralized deployment configurations. In a centralized deployment multiple Talking SIP™ nodes can be seamlessly deployed around a shared NAS/SAN device for caller announcement from local and remote locations while being hosted by a centralized conference server.
- Optional centralized NAS/SAN storage option to allow recorded names to be centrally stored and accessed by multiple Talking SIP™ nodes.
- Supports centralized, decentralized and hybrid deployment models.
- Centralized licensing to allow conference resources to be shared across the network.
- Supports remote just-in-time license upgrades.
- Support for automatic fail-over to another conference server in the event of failure or a lack of a timely response.
What is VoIP Conferencing?
Conferencing is a vital service to any business, institution and government agency and is instrumental when conducting multi-party meeting, group presentations, and distance learning where one or more parties, regardless of physical proximity, needs to be brought together cost-effectively and efficiently. Most conferencing services today allow participants to dial into a conference via an 800 toll-free or local access number or be called at a pre-determined location, they can be prompted to enter a conference room number or this can be preset, they have the option to announce themselves into the conference and then they can join the conference in a peer-to-peer, presenter/audience or a moderator based configuration.
Conferencing units of the past, when deployed at the enterprise-level, needed to be physically located at each location and were commonly linked to the companies PBX via analog or digital interface cards – this past method was expensive to deploy, geographically limiting, and carried with it high administrative costs. With today’s SIP-based VoIP conferencing servers, there is no need to put the conferencing server in each enterprise location as one VoIP conferencing server can service multiple locations, anywhere in the world. With this new technology conferences can involve participants from any IP-enabled or traditional phone, desktop softphone, WiFi/3G mobile softphone or web application.
Conferences can be pre-scheduled via the web and participants automatically brought into the conference to avoid long distance access charges as well as avoid having to be reminded of the conference. With VoIP conferencing reservation and reservation-less conferences are supported with web management to schedule the conference, control participant guidance/announcements, implement security access, and limit conference room capacity all in a very cost-effective and streamlined manner that helps unite friends, colleagues, business partners, and students while driving down travel costs and fostering dialogue.
