Conferencing Agent Enhancing the Communication Experience

Transcription

1 White Paper Conferencing Agent Enhancing the Communication Experience To achieve corporate operational excellence, the existing resources of an organization must be utilized to the best possible extent. Time management, communication and collaboration are the most important tools to optimize resource utilization. At present, calendaring, a time management tool, is used in conjunction with audio conferences. Meeting events are created in the calendar and invitations sent to participants to join the meetings. If participants accept a calendar meeting invitation, then it is their responsibility to join the voice conference at the scheduled time. It is possible that participants forget to join the call at the scheduled time: to prevent this, they would need to set reminders. Again, while joining the call, dial-in details and pass codes available in the invite need to be accessed. This is a drain on the participant s time and energy, especially when there are many meetings scheduled in a day. In addition, conference calling on a traditional telephonic network is expensive. We have, therefore, explored options to make audio conferencing a costeffective, better user experience. A solution that attempts to address these problems should offer an integrated system that extracts

2 meeting details from the calendar application, processes them and connects all the meeting invitees who have accepted the meeting to the Conferencing Bridge at the scheduled time. Such a solution can be used to eliminate the need of setting reminders and dialling of large numbers. Also it may offer better user experience to employees and help them work efficiently leading to productivity gain. 2

3 About the Author Ritesh Kumar Mohapatra Ritesh Kumar Mohapatra has been working with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) for the past three years. He is competent in Java, PHP, Web Services, Avaya, UCC and SIP, Erlang, XMPP, instant messaging and calendaring. He has experience in the Unified Communication and Collaboration Centre of Excellence and is currently working in this domain. Bijay Kumar Sahoo Bijaya Kumar Sahoo is a Solution Architect with over 15 years of experience at TCS. He has been involved in architecting solutions on a diverse set of technology platforms for customers in the Banking, Financial Services and Insurance industries. Currently he leads the Unified Communication and Collaboration Centre of Excellence. 3

4 Table of Contents 1. Introduction 5 2. Conferencing: The On-going Approach 5 3. Conferencing Agent Overall Working of Conferencing Agent Fetching Meeting Events Processing Meeting Details Making Conference Calls 8 4. Salient Features 8 5. Potential Benefits 9 6. Conclusion 9 4

5 1. Introduction Today s corporate realm is characterized by intense global competition, increasing technology specialization and accelerated decision-making. To stay ahead of competition, organizations need to make the most of their resources. This requires proper management of available resources. Optimal resource management can be defined as the use of right resources dedicated to the right purpose; implying a situation where no resource is either idle or over-utilized. However, resource management will remain a distant goal without effective communication and collaboration. In many organizations, ing and instant messaging have come to define communication and collaboration. Recently, calendaring has also emerged as a powerful communication and collaboration tool. Individual and group time management can be enhanced through calendaring. When choosing a calendaring service, one should look for efficiency, scalability, ease of use and cost effectiveness. The calendar feature is often used to create and send meeting invites to participants along with the dial-in details. However, this also entails the setting of reminders, updates to incorporate changes in dial-in details and the need to share long numbers. To improve user experience, organizations can look at implementing a conferencing agent solution. A conferencing agent should fetch meeting event details and other related data from calendar applications and connect all participants who have accepted the meeting invitation to an audio-conference automatically. VoIP services may be integrated to help achieve the cost-effectiveness in the conferencing solution. This document discusses the concept of the proposed solution. This white paper will be useful to developers working in calendaring related applications and to business users who wish to use such solutions in their organization. 2. Conferencing: The On-going Approach Audio conferencing is a common business collaboration tool. Here, whenever a person receives a meeting or tele-conference invite created in a calendar application like Google calendar, the person is free to accept or decline it. If participants accept the invitation, then they have to remember the time of the meeting or set a reminder to join the meeting requiring additional effort. Again, when joining the meeting the user has to check and dial the conferencing bridge details and the participant s code. If any updates have been made to the bridge, these must be communicated to all participants. Attending several such meetings can thus be a drain of time and lead to loss of productivity. However, this experience can be made smoother by automating the entire process. Such automation ensures that after accepting the invite, users need not keep track of reminders and call-in details; they will automatically be connected to the bridge at the right time. Audio conferencing is an expensive proposition since telephonic service providers charge considerably to provide their conferencing services. A new way to obtain low cost audio conferencing services using VoIP provides added advantage to organizations. 5

6 A software based conferencing agent that will automate the tasks related to conferencing can help address common problems and improve the overall communication experience. Hmm..! It is rescheduled again. Set the reminder. Oh! The meeting has been cancelled.? Are the bridge details updated? It is time to join the call. Where are the dialling details? Fig.1: Illustrating the Problem 3. Collaboration using a conferencing agent A conferencing agent can automate conferences using a service account. A service account is a common calendaring account for a group or organization to facilitate conferencing. This account is used by the solution to pull meeting events. A user who wishes to use this solution must include the service account s ID in his/her meeting invitation along with the other participants IDs. A conferencing agent runs on the system of the person designated as the owner of the service account. Once the meeting events are created, this solution will read relevant information from the calendar and automatically connect all the invitees who have accepted the meeting invitation to the audio conference at the scheduled time. This eliminates the need for the participants to remember the schedule and dial-in details of the meeting. The participants simply have to accept the meeting invitation and at the scheduled time, their VoIP phone will ring automatically; they need to answer the phone to join the conference call. Such solutions can use open source products such as Asterisk as the VoIP server. The user can answer the call using an IP phone at his/her desk. Alternatively a good head set and a soft phone in the PC or laptop may be used. Configuration files can be used to store information required to connect to the calendar server and properties for easy configuration. As it can be run by an authorized person, only he/she will be able to access the files containing configuration settings. 3.1 Working of a conferencing agent 6

7 The working of such a solution can be segregated into three broad functions (see Figure 2): fetch meeting events, process meeting details and make conference calls Fetch Meeting Events The agent should read the configuration details and connect to calendar applications such as Google calendar, MS Outlook, Zimbra etc. Once the solution connects to a calendar service, it will read all the meeting events for the service account. The solution will fetch the meeting details at regular intervals for Making Conference Calls Processing Meeting Details Fetching Meeting Events Fig.2: Diagram Representing the Basic Processes in conferencing agent any updates Process Meeting Details After obtaining the meeting events, the solution will check for details like meeting identifier, meeting start and end time, list of participants, participants acceptance status and so on. It ignores past meeting events, and should check for new entries or updates. For each new meeting event, it creates a process to make calls at the scheduled time. If it finds the meeting has been cancelled, it immediately stops the previously created process. In case of rescheduled meetings or added participants, it modifies the process appropriately Make Conference Calls At the scheduled time, the agent will look up the contact numbers of all the participants from the directory. The contact directory may hold IDs and contact numbers along with other information. The conferencing agent will call the conference related web service with the participant information and bridge details. The web service will instruct the VoIP server connect the participants to the conferencing 7

8 bridge. 4. Key attributes of a conferencing agent A conferencing agent solution must be designed to offer has the following key features: n Ease of Use It should be easy to use and user friendly. Any user should be able to include the service account to send meeting invites and avail of the auto-conferencing facility. Conferencing Agenet User Setting Process Events Calender Interface Reads Calender Events Meeting Events Calender Service Account Calls Web Service Log Files Conference Bridge Participant 3 Audio Conference Web Service Initiates Call Participant 2 VoIP Server Participant 1 Fig.3: Working of conferencing agent NB: The above diagram represents various components of the proposed conference solution. n n n Easy Installation and Setup The solution should be capable of running on any system with an internet connection. There should be an installer or a package included for easy installation. Extensibility The solution design should allow easy extensibility to various calendaring services such as Google Calendar, Zimbra Calendar, IBM Lotus Notes Calendar, Microsoft Outlook etc. It may also offer support for different VoIP servers.. Flexibility The solution should be configurable for different polling intervals for reading events. There should be no restriction on the number of meetings scheduled. 8

9 n Secure Only authorized persons should be allowed to access configuration files of conferencing agent. In addition, the solution should authenticate the participants before using the VoIP server Potential Benefits Implementing a conferencing agent solution for collaboration within any organization will provide several benefits including: Enhanced Communication Experience As such a solution will offer seamless integration across various collaboration elements, it shall provide a better communication experience for the user. Increased Productivity The agent will eliminate the need to lookup information and manually dial in to the conference, thereby saving the user time and effort. This will increase overall productivity of employees. Cost Savings The option of using open source VoIP servers for conferencing will help reduce conferencing costs. 6. Conclusion Conferencing agents are an innovative idea to aid auto-conferencing. The solution takes utmost care to emulate a real-time conference environment. The implementation of such a solution could improve communication experience and help in reducing unnecessary time spent to join a meeting as well as conferencing expenditure, leading to improvement in employee satisfaction, productivity and efficiency. References [1] [2] [3] 9

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