Conference Options in CME

Hey Guys,

Sorry its been a while since I posted, I have been diligently preparing for my CCIE Voice lab exam again (i'm going to smash it this time!)

So in tune with that, I have been studying lots of features in CME and CCM and I wanted to talk about conferencing in CME

First of all, heres a quick run down:

CME supports ad-hoc and meet-me conferencing.

Ad-hoc is supported in both software mode and hardware mode, while meet-me is only supported in hardware-mode conferences.

Hardware mode means that you must have a conference dspfarm resource registered to the CCME.


The ad-hoc in software mode is also limited to 3 participants as it uses a built in bridge on the phone. The participants must all be using the same codec.

Now here are some options for the software-based conferencing that you might not know:

First off, live-record (the cisco unity express feature) WILL work with software-based conferences as long as the codec used between all parties is G.711

Have you ever gone under an ephone and seen
"keep-conference"

and wondered what it was? well wonder no more, the keep-conference keyword is a way of controlling what happens when a conference initator leaves a software-based conference (it has no effect whatsoever on hardware-based conferences)

[no] keep-conference [end-call] [local-only]

Really quickly, heres how it works:

if no keep-conference is entered (the default) then if a conference initiator leaves the conference in any way the call is dropped, if the keep-conference command is there by itself, if the initator just hangs up the two other parties are connected to each other but if he presses 'end-call' then the call is dropped (strange I know)


if you have keep-conference end-call then no matter how the initiator hangs up the conference stays up. the local-only keyword ensures that all of these rules only apply if at least one local party is left in the conference.

So now you know the options around the software based conferences

hardware based conferencing (ad-hoc) adds the ability to add more than a certain number of participants (obviously) and also adds support for conflist (shows a list of conference participants) , rmlstc (removes the last caller) and join and select (allows joining of existing calls to conference)

the maximum participants for a conference is set under the dspfarm profile

dspfarm profile 1 conference
maximum conference-participants <>
!

now, some options available to you with conferencing on a hardware-based conference are:

conference add-mode creator

this command means that the only person allowed to add more people to a conference is the creator (this is done under the ephone) whenever that particular ephone creates a conference.

This might be useful for a CEO or someone who does not want other conference participants being able to add more people into the conference.

conference drop-mode creator and local

these are kind of the opposite way around to the keep-confernece command, by default a conference will always stay up if on a DSP farm even if the initiator leaves, with this command you can force it so that if the conference creator leaves the conference is dropped.

Now we come onto one more option that i think is very cool

conference admin

this command means that the phone tagged with this can admin any conference, so any conference he joins he can remove participants and add more participants, one very cool feature it has is that he can even join existing conferences by dialing the ad-hoc number of the conference!

I hope this helps someone out there