Whether board meetings, daily virtual stand-ups, or routine operations calls, ZipDX customers often hold recurring conference calls. There are in fact three ways to schedule a conference call; via Outlook Calendar, Google Calendar or the ZipDX web portal. Each approach provides for recurring conferences. However, these existing tools didn’t answer every situation adequately, which left some room for recent improvements.

For Example: A Daily Project Status Call

A daily status conference may be part of your routine. When conferences are so very routine, the Call-Me feature is often used get the team connected quickly and efficiently. If you don’t have to wait for the group to assemble, the daily status call can be 10 minutes of assured productivity, not a burdensome inconvenience.

Let’s also presume that the status call is about a project that has a hard end date. While daily, it doesn’t go on forever. It happens every working day until the project winds down.

In addition, there may be a handful of days in the year when it may not be appropriate to hold the regular status conference. For example, the common American holidays of Christmas Day, New Year’s Day, Memorial Day and Labor Day.

ZipDX provides two new mechanisms to address this situation. When scheduling the call via our web portal you can now accommodate:

1. Regular recurring conferences with a defined end to the sequence.
2. Arbitrary exceptions to the pattern of recurrence.

Considering the sample above, we’ll now examine how to schedule a conference that occurs every Monday-Friday, until the end of February 2020, with the exception of common US holidays.

How-To: Basic Conference Setup

• Log into the ZipDX portal using your email address an PIN or passphrase.
• Select the desired conference template and click the Create Conference link.
• Set the conference start Date & Time.
• Set the planned conference Duration.
• In the Auto-recurring setting select Mon-Fri.
• In the Until section set the expiry date to February 28, 2020.
• Don’t add participants just yet – that will come later.
• Set the various Audio Features as appropriate for the series.
• Click Save to schedule the conference

At this point you’ve scheduled the conference to happen Monday – Friday until the selected end date. We did not add any participants, since the details of the schedule are not fully defined and we don’t want unnecessary and potentially confusing meeting invitations to be sent.

Modifying the Conference Schedule

With the conference now in our database, we can establish the exceptions to the schedule.

• If you’re still viewing the Conference Verification page look into the far upper right corner and click on the button labelled Exception Dates.
• You will see a calendar with all the projected dates for your conference.
• Click on each date when you don’t want the conference to occur.
• Click Save to store the changes.
• Click on the Modify Conference button in the upper right corner.
• Add the conference participants as per normal.
• Click Save to update the scheduled conference.

You’ll once again see the Conference Verification page, this time with all the participants listed. At this point the system has just sent each participants a meeting invitation that includes all the scheduled conferences. when they accept that invitation those calls will appear in their calendars.

If you click the link to Email yourself an invite you’ll receive a similar invitation, so it can appear in your own calendar, too.

The meeting invitations clearly indicated that the sequence occurs Monday-Friday and lists the exceptions. Participants who accept the invitation will see this documented in their personal calendars.