New Feature: Create a Conference Template From a Past Call

Our customer’s are fascinating. New customers bring to light new challenges. They drive us to continually evolve the capabilities of our platform. Some days that means addressing issues of great complexity, but occasionally a new customer will bring us a very simple request. This is about a handy new feature arising from one such occasion.

New Customers

In the process of onboarding a new customer we often work directly with their team, helping them to become familiar with our system. We may even help them through their first significant conference. That said, the system is designed let people manage their own activity. Our goal is always to help them help themselves.

In this particular case the new customer had just completed a positively massive amount of online training. Talk about trial by fire! They held a series of very large conferences, over several days, making tremendous use of our breakout rooms feature.

With the last call in the series completed, they turned their attention to planning the next set of events. It would be basically an re-enactment of the past exercise.

A Logical Question

They asked a simple question; “Can I use a past conference to create a new conference template?”

It’s a good question. If they could do that, it would make the process of preparing for new round of training very simple indeed. After all, the system already had all of the participant details, and every last conference setting in the records of the past calls.

Given the size and complexity of their calls, creating one anew could take 20-30 minutes. Adding all of the participants and setting the conference properties isn’t difficult, but the requirement to do it all again creates the opportunity to make mistakes.

A New Feature is Launched

What they asked, while a perfectly sensible idea, wasn’t possible at the time. We had to respond, “Not today, but let us get back to you about it!”

The idea was outlined to the development team, who took it from concept to implementation in just a few days. Now any past call can be turned into a new conference template is just a few seconds.

A Practical Example

Let us imagine that Marge Simpson was tasked with getting her family together to go over script ideas for the coming season of their TV show. They are in the off-season break, scattered around the country, which makes a conference call the most convenient way to have this discussion. It will take several discussions to work through everything that needs to be done.

In creating the initial conference she invites all of the participants to the call. She does this using their email addresses (as pictured below), registering each person so they each get a PIN. Our Identity Conferencing mechanism will ensure that there are no interlopers clandestinely listening to the conference.

The first  conference goes well, but there remains much to be done. Since there will be several subsequent conferences with the very same participants she wants to make a conference template to make scheduling later events easier.

How-To:

• Log into the zipdx.com web portal using your email address & PIN.
• Scroll down to the Completed Conferences portion of the Home tab.
• Click on the title of the completed conference to be used as a template.
• Click on the Copy To Template button in the upper right corner of the page.
• The settings from the prior call are automatically transferred into the form used to create a conference template.
• Make any desired changes to the settings.
• Click on Save to store the new template.

The entire process takes just seconds.

Advantages

There are significant advantages to creating a conference template that can be reused over time.

1. Easy Repeatability

For anyone who prefers to create conferences via our web portal, the process will be blissfully quick and easy. After logging in, select the template, set the date and time for the new conference, and click Save.

Everything else is already preset. No need to worry about the details.

2. Share-ability

A template can be shared, allowing others on the account to schedule these very conferences just as easily.

3. Spontaneous Conferencing

A conference template can be used to launch a conference in a completely spontaneous fashion.

The organizer can dial-in to ZipDX, once recognized, the system prompts, “Press 1 to start or join a conference using a conference code.” They press 1, then enter the conference code for the template. The system will instantly launch a new conference using the conference template

The system will immediately dial-out to all of the participants who have Call-Me enabled for the phone numbers in their profiles . In this example case, it’s literally an instant, virtual family gathering.

This approach to spontaneous conferencing is the mechanism that we prescribe when groups are implementing a telephonic crisis response scheme.

Summary

The ability to create a conference template from a past conference is a small thing, but it’s a nice thing. It makes using ZipDX easier, whether your conferences are for six or six hundred people.

Questions?

If you have questions about any aspect of ZipDX please contact our support team at:

• 1-888-947-3955,
• Or, +1-312-348-8175,
• Or, email support@zipdx.com.

We’re here to help you get down to business.