Dial-in Conferencing

Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 will reach end of support on January 9, 2018. To stay supported, you will need to upgrade. For more information, see Resources to help you upgrade your Office 2007 servers and clients.

 

Topic Last Modified: 2013-06-26

Conferences work well if all attendees have access to client-access components, such as Microsoft Office Communicator, but there are often situations where someone needs to attend but doesn’t have access to these components, such as a user who may be temporarily out of the office without computer access. To enable such users to participate in a conference, you can deploy dial-in conferencing. This feature enables users to use a public switched telephone network (PSTN) phone to join the audio portion of an on-premises Web conference, without requiring your organization to use the services of a third-party audio conferencing provider.

Dial-in conferencing is implemented by two Office Communications Server applications: Conferencing Attendant and Conferencing Announcement Service. By dialing an access number that maps to the Conferencing Attendant SIP URI and then entering a conference ID, dial-in conferencing users are added to the conference participant list when they join a conference. Conferencing Announcement Service plays entry and exit tones to announce when a phone user joins or leaves a conference. Furthermore, users of dial-in conferencing who have Active Directory credentials can be authenticated and, subsequently, listed in a conference participant list by name. Conference leaders can exercise conference controls on all users in a participant list, including dial-in conferencing users, and conference participants who joined the conference using a Communicator client can view the participant list to see who is in attendance. Conferencing Announcement Service also announces when a phone user has been muted or unmuted.

Dial-in conferencing can be used for scheduled meetings or unscheduled meetings. If your organization uses Microsoft Office Outlook, you can deploy the Conferencing Add-in for Outlook to enable users to schedule on-premises Web conferences. Meeting invitations that are created using the add-in include conference access information for dial-in conferencing users. Conferencing Attendant uses the same meeting policies that you configure for Web conferencing. Depending on the level of access that you configure for meetings, A/V conferences can include authenticated dial-in conferencing users who are users inside or outside your organization’s firewall, anonymous users without Active Directory credentials, or both.

In addition to determining whether A/V conferencing with support for dial-in conferencing is required by your organization, you also need to determine whether you need to support Enterprise Voice or anonymous users. Dial-in conferencing can be deployed in your organization whether or not you deploy Microsoft’s software-powered Voice over IP (VoIP) solution, Enterprise Voice.

For a feature overview of Conferencing Attendant and Conferencing Announcement Service, see New Dial-in Conferencing Feature and Dial-in Audio Conferencing in Office Communicator, which are both topics in New Server Features in the Getting Started documentation.

For a technical overview of Conferencing Attendant and Conferencing Announcement Service, see Dial-in Conferencing Architecture in New Server Features in the Getting Started documentation.