Giving mobile phone users the capability to create OCS 2007 R2 conferences

September 10th, 2010 | Tags:

It’s not always straight forward quantifying the savings of UC, the benefits are far easier to get your head around. But when we deployed Communications Server 2007 R2 within our organisation we knew it would slash the extortionate conferencing charges we had been paying – our estimate was in excess of £50,000 per annum!

During the roll-out we identified an issue with a certain telephony user profile – our road warriors. These are the folks that have IM and presence, but don’t need voice, aka an Enterprise OCS CAL, as their lives revolve around their mobile phones.

The issue was allowing these so called “warriors” to setup and establish Live Meeting conference calls, as a “leader”. As a leader they are required to authenticate, in their case from a foreign PSTN end-point (their mobiles) using their telephone number, which given they were not voice users caused us a problem.

One of our legendary IT engineers found a workaround…

First of all find your mobile user within Active Directory User and Computers, then select the “Communications” tab. Next click the “Telephony settings” button (see below).

Once you are presented with the chosen users telephony settings complete the “Line URI” field and add the mobile number for your user.

With this complete you can now act as a leader from any PSTN phone using the number above (when the conferencing attendant prompts you for your number you should enter it without the + i.e. 447917555666), you could have course add a zero instead of a plus, but that wouldn’t be very e.164 of you)

Credit: Andy Norman

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