Unsupervised ad-hoc conferencing

[temple]

Hi, great forum, this has been my absolute go to for some time! I have come across an issue today which I can not find a solution to!

We migrated from an old panasonic system to the mitel 5000 recently. One of the features that was used quite a bit was to bridge external parties together. A secretary would call external party1 and then conference in external party2. Once all connected, they would then hang up and leave the two to have their conversation without having to pay for the call and disclose the phone number of each party.

I have tried to do this today on the 5000 and discovered that when I hang up, the two external parties are still connected but can not hear each other. Is there a way round this?

Annoyingly I know the meet-me conf will let unsupervised callers chat to each other, but I know my external people don't want to incurr the call costs!

[dwayneg]

Try this: call party A.  Press Transfer, then 8 or outgoing, dial party B.  Announce call, turn loos, that should do it.  Remember that there's a system timer Unsupervised CO that limits the length of these calls, default is a short 5 minutes but can be increased as high as 255 minutes.

[temple]

thanks .. that should work. Of course, there is going to be the time they need to do it for 3 or 4 callers! So is it not going to be possible?

[cholzhauer]

Point an 800 number at the DID for conferencing?

[dwayneg]

Pretty sure you should be able to build a conference the traditional way and then leave, I know I've done it.  I'll test it Monday and see if anything special needs to be done.  Might need to build the conference minus the last party, then transfer to him.

[anjo]

Unless I'm mistaken, this sounds perfect for Meet Me Conferencing.  I see someone has already suggested have a 800 number point to the conference bridge.  however any DID will work and if you have the AA pick up first you can setup an extension to dial so you don't need to spend more money on a DID (I know, not much money but I'm cheap).

With our system. 
1. I log into my portal and generate a 7 digit conference code.
2. I then email all the parties I need involved in that conversation with:
   a. The date.
   b. The time.
   c. Our main phone number.
   d. The Conference Bridge Extension.
   e. The 7 digit access code.
3. All parties call in at the same time and the system will connect them.  You don't need to have anything to do the the call.  I'm not certain of the timer but I think after one hour the call is terminated.  I'm certain the call timer can be changed if you need it but not really on the fly.

[temple]

We spend AGES on this yesterday and discovered that it is possible! Essentially, someone has to "own" the conference. So in my example of the ad-hoc, rather than just hanging up, we have to put the conf on hold and then hang up. It uses one the call keys and conference on the phone, but the external parties can continue to chat. Once they hang up, the call key automatically clears. This is quite good because we could get back into the conference if we wanted to.

The other way we did it was to indeed use a meet me conf. We setup a conf access code and then called the conf assistant. From there, we were able to add callers to the conference (we have 5360 handsets so use the touch screen, not sure what the feature code is!) and dial them in. Once they were all added, we could hang up and leave them to it without utilizing a call key. The callers come straight into the conf, so don't need to worry about the access code etc.

We're nervous about setting up access codes and dishing them out to everyone as I've no doubt the cheeky customers we have would discover they could use our PBX as their free call conferencing gateway. I hope mitel one day set up a "Leaders PIN" facility so that the conference can't start until the leader has entered the room!

Thanks for your input on this...