Conference Bridge

[cburgy]

Anyone using the conference bridge out there? What are your thoughts? We have one customer who is using a 24 port bridge.

[Forum]

I have a customer using 24 ports. They are a small development office, but they hold alot of decent size conference calls. They weren't 'advanced' enough to actually use it the way they should, So I created a couple of 'generic' conferences that don't expire for like a year, and gave them the login info. They use it daily, and love it.

Charles

[nextstep]

We have a 12 port unit, and it works ok.

To be honest, the conf bridge is the area that shortel really falls short. Most of my users, and I, are used to systems where you have a "meet me" functions that never expire, and you have many more ports.

Hope Shoretel will the add meet me feature soon. It is difficult to explain to folks who have used Avaya or Cisco systems that they can't have their own meet me number.

[sparkomatic]

I just set one up in our office and it's great. Although, I'm having trouble gaining access to it from the outside world. Something with my DNS settings on the server but haven't quite got it yet.

[aspen]

The name to the bridge needs to resolve internally and externally.

The easiest way to do so would be with a split DNS or a firewall that supports some kind of NAT lookback.

Let me know if you would like more details.

[sparkomatic]

I'd love more details. Currently, our website is hosted by another company and is www.enterprise-com.com

My bridge is conference.enterprise-com.com so I'm trying to do, what I believe is an A record?, to this address.

I have a SonicWall with (5) static IP's.

[aspen]

No matter how you get to the bridge it redirects the conntection to the full url of the bridge.

If you run an internal DNS server, which you probly are if you can connect to it by name internally, just add the an A record to your enterprise-com.com zone. The a record would point to the address of the bridge.

For this to work clients connecting to the bridge would have to point to the internal DNS server.

For out side support you would have to set up an inbound NAT publishing on the SW that translates to the bridge. You would then need to have your ISP add a A record for the bridge that points to the address on the SW that you are using for your inbound NAT.

On the SW depending on what flavor you have, Standard or Enhanced the NAT setup is alittle different but pretty straight forward.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

[akeeney]

We have a 12 port unit, and it works ok.

To be honest, the conf bridge is the area that shortel really falls short. Most of my users, and I, are used to systems where you have a "meet me" functions that never expire, and you have many more ports.

Hope Shoretel will the add meet me feature soon. It is difficult to explain to folks who have used Avaya or Cisco systems that they can't have their own meet me number.

Agree with nextstep - this function is immature in Shoretel's platform. Many bugs, can not get the Email invitation to work properly, and not very end-user friendly. As such, we can't seem to get our people to use it when other options are available.