Fast way to join an Audio Conference

Enter your PIN Code...Enter your password, sorry not recognised please *bbbrrrrr disconnected.

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Sometimes joining Audio/Dial-in conferences can be an utter pain. Please enter your pin number, please enter the password, I’m sorry, that’s incorrect, please dial again while standing on one leg and singing about daises.

Now, you can of course fix this with
Microsoft Lync, but believe it or not not every organisation has it yet. Yeah I know, right? It’s true.

Anyway, with a bit of manipulation of the dial string you can automate joining to such conferences.

By way of example, let’s imagine we have a dial in PSTN number of +443448002400, a conference ID of 1234, and a conference password of 4321. Joining this from a phone is pretty easy - dial the number...wait, enter the pin code followed by hash...wait, enter password followed by hash etc.

Well, I put all of these commands on to a single dial string and then have them in my address book. What would the dial-string look like for the above conference ID? Well, it would look this this:

+443448002400,,,,1234#,,,,4321#

The commas pause for 1 second so you may need to adjust the number of commas you use - I find that 3 or 4 is usually adequate.

In the above example, the phone dials the phone number, waits 4 seconds, enters the pin and hash, waits 4 seconds, and then enters the PIN followed by hash.

This makes it far easier joining regular, known conferences. In my car for example I have
my conference bridge programmed into one of the fast dial buttons - I just hit it, it automatically takes me in to my conference.

I also add in to my address book common conf dial ins for people I normally interact with, so I’ll have:

Conf - Steve
Conf - Paul
Conf - Helpdesk

...for example.

Anyways, it’s an obvious one if you’ve used it before, but it surprises me how many people don’t know you can do this with a lot of systems - so I thought I’d share.


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