Conferencing allows you to join three or more parties in a telephone conversation. Two types of conferencing are available on the Cisco Unified Communications 500 System: ad hoc and meet-me.
Meet-me conferences are created by parties calling a designated conference number. Meet-me conferencing is hardware-based only. If you configure software-based conferencing, you cannot have meet-me conferences. The following steps assume the system has been already configured in PBX mode.
Setup steps:
1. Launch Cisco Configuration Assistant (CCA) on your laptop. Please make sure that a basic PBX system is already setup
2. From the left menus, click on Configure > Telephony > Voice, and select the “Voice Features” tab
3. Click on “Enable Multiparty Conferencing”. You will have the opportunity to select the number of conference bridges, the number of participants, sessions and the meet-me extensions. For the purpose of this lab, the default values are sufficient.
4. Click “Apply” and then “OK”. Wait for the phones to reboot.
5. Next step is to assign a one of the FXO ports to the Meet-me bridge, so one external caller can join the conference call when created. Ideally, a DID would be mapped to the meet-me extension in order to allow multiple external parties to join the call. Click on Dialplan > Incoming and select the “Incoming FXO Calls” tab
6. Select port 0/1/3 and “Destination type = Operator”. Enter the meet me number configured earlier under “Destination”
7. Click “Apply” and then “OK”.
Verification Steps:
1. From any IP phone, press “New Call” and then the “Meetme” softkey. Dial “771” when prompted by a dialtone.
2. At this point, you would have started the conference bridge and other internal extension will be able to join it by dialing “771” or the PSTN number associated with this extension.
