New Feature: Recurring Conferences

Many organizations gather the same group for routine calls on a repeating basis. ZipDX offers two ways you can schedule these calls to take advantage of our unique security and convenience features, including assuring only the people invited to the meeting can attend, and calling participants automatically at meeting time.

1. Using Your Electronic Calendar

The original way to set up a ZipDX recurring meeting is to use our electronic calendar (typically Outlook or Google Calendar) to set the date, time, recurrence pattern, and list of attendees. Include ZipDX as a participant, and the system will put the details of your meetings into its database.

Using this approach, ZipDX is essentially saved to your calendar. All changes to the scheduled conferences must be made using your calendar, making sure ZipDX gets copied of any modifications. For details, see Integration with Online Calendaring.

2. Using a Setting in Your Conference Template

More recently, we’ve made it possible to set up repeating meetings from the www.ZipDX.com web portal. The details are described here:

Creating A Conference

When you create a new meeting at www.ZipDX.com, you’ll see a drop-down box allowing you to specify an auto-recurrence of weekly, every two weeks, daily, or Monday through Friday. Set the date and time for the first meeting in your series. When each meeting ends, ZipDX will automatically create the next one at the interval you set.

Participants will get emails letting them know about the new meeting. As the Organizer, you will not automatically get an email, but you can choose to send one to yourself from the confirmation screen after you SAVE.

Note that the meetings will follow the Organizer’s time zone, so if the Organizer is in Chicago, a meeting set for 3 PM Central Standard Time in the winter will shift to 3 PM Central Daylight time in the spring.

Modifying Settings

You can modify any of the conference settings by selecting the pending (next) meeting at www.ZipDX.com, making the desired adjustments, and then saving your changes. Those settings will be in effect for all future meetings; that is, unless you change them again.

Changing the Day, Time, or Recurrence

To change the day and/or time of the meeting, or the interval at which it repeats, wait until after the last meeting at the old day/time has finished. Access the pending meeting for the day/time you want to change, set the new day/time, and click SAVE.

Now, all future meetings will be on the new schedule. To restore the original schedule, repeat this procedure, and reset the day/time/recurrence parameters to the previous values.

Cancellation

To cancel the meeting series, find the next meeting in the Pending Conferences display, and delete it. If you just want to cancel one (or a few) meeting(s) in the series, access the first meeting you want to cancel at www.ZipDX.com when it becomes the Pending meeting. Reset the date forward to when you want the next meeting to occur.

Opt-Out

ZipDX allows attendees to individually disable the call-me feature, or completely opt out of a meeting. If they opt-out, they won’t be routed to it, even if they dial in. Once set, these selections will automatically carry forward to each new instance of the meeting, until the attendee again-alters their setting.

Notifications

ZipDX sends email notifications to attendees when the conference is created. The emails include an electronic calendar attachment; this will show the meeting repeating indefinitely at the specified interval.

If a change is made to meeting date, time, or repeat interval, ZipDX will send a new email with a calendar attachment reflecting the new schedule parameters; this will replace the old information that was previously on the calendar.

If a participant is added or deleted, or a role is altered, ZipDX will send an appropriate invitation or cancellation to the affected participants.

Note: ZipDX will NOT send notices as each new meeting is scheduled according to the interval you specify.

Deciding Which Approach To Use

Which of the two ways you prefer depends upon what’s important to you. Here are some things to consider in deciding how you should proceed.

Scheduling Recurring Conferences Via Outlook or Google Calendar

• Makes your calendar the reference source of information
• Requires familiarity with the details of the calendaring process
• Requires changes be made in your calendar, ensuring meeting updates are also sent to ZipDX
• May integrate with other participants’ calendars for shared status/availability
• Usually results in two emails to each invited participant: one from your calendar with all of the general details of the conference and one from ZipDX with that participant’s unique connection details
• Allows you to include supplemental information – for example, a formal agenda or other supporting documentation

Scheduling Recurring Conferences Via ZipDX.com

• Makes ZipDX.com the reference source of information
• Is much simpler than creating meeting invitations in Outlook or Google Calendar
• Any changes must be made using ZipDX.com
• A single initial email invitation is sent to each participant from ZipDX
• That message includes the participants unique connection details
• It also includes a calendar object that will put the recurring event into the participants’ calendar
• It does not provide a way to include an agenda or supplemental documents
• Routine email traffic is reduced, as meeting updates are only sent if the conference is changed

In both cases, participants receive an invitation email including a calendar object, so the conferences will appear in their calendars. We think many people will find the simplicity of creating automatically-recurring conferences via ZipDX.com the more attractive option.

We’re continually working to solve conferencing problems for customers. While we aim to offer the most capable audio conference service available, we also recognize the need to keep its use as simple as possible. This new facility to create automatically-recurring conferences via the portal at ZipDX.com should simplify this matter for many conference organizers.

If you have questions about this, or any other aspect of ZipDX, please contact support@zipdx.com, or call us at 1-888-947-3955 or +1-312-348-8175.