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Conferencing
Overview
Aculab Cloud supports conferencing together two or more calls. A call that joins a conference is called a conference party or conference participant. A number of options can be set for each party as they join the conference, including whether the party can talk to the conference or listen only. A party can be configured to be a conference leader, in which case the conference will start when the party joins and end when the party leaves.
API features are available to control how a participant interacts with the conference.
Conference types
There are two types of conferences, unreserved and reserved:
| Conference type | Description |
|---|---|
| Unreserved | Unreserved conferences can be created at any time and are limited to 40 participants. The conferences are identified by their name, which has to be unique within your account. They are created when the first participant joins the conference and are destroyed when the last participant leaves the conference. For more information, see Unreserved conference documentation. |
| Reserved | Reserved conferences can have up to 350 participants but have to be reserved in advance using the managing conferences web services. The conferences are identified by their name, which has to be unique within your account. They are created at the designated time, and are terminated after the reservation has expired. For more information about this type of conference, see the Reserved conference documentation. |
Conferencing and inbound services
The person calling your conference telephone number will be calling one of your Inbound Services. This invokes an instance of the inbound application that you named in your service. The inbound application will answer the call and connect it to the conference.
Before connecting the call to the conference your inbound application can perform other actions, for instance, prompting for a conference ID to be typed in; or checking that the call is not too early or too late and, if it is too early or too late, play a message and hang up.
The inbound service will use an extra channel to connect the call to the conference. The extra channel that is used to connect the caller to the conference is identified by the conference participant ID. This can be used within the managing conferences web services to change the capabilities of that participant.
Conference control
Once the call has been connected to the conference, you maintain the ability to control the conference participant by means of the managing conferences web services. You can, for instance, mute a particular participant to give others a chance to speak. To perform conference participant actions you will need the participant ID. During the design phase of your conferencing platform you might want to consider how you are going to identify the participants.
