End-User Tip #1 – How to conference call on the run
For many corporate environments, end-user education on new technologies is the most difficult. Usually e-mails, intranet, webinars, help desk and word-of-month are all components of a successful implementation of new technology. Even though mobile devices have been part of corporate culture for a while now they are no exception. :-)
I will attempt from time to time to post useful ideas that could be used in a corporate environment from a perspective of an enterprise admin that manages a large number of mobile devices.
Conference Calling
In most corporate environments today you will have the need to gather several employees on the dreaded conference bridge of your flavor. The setup and scheduling can vary from vendor to vendor, and many even have internal bridge solutions.
Meeting requests are sent out to the relevant employees and you will see a huge number of business people using their mobile devices to take these calls while traveling or outside of their corporate office (if they even have a physical office anymore).
For the busy business person it can be painful to remember the conference bridge number and PIN or access codes used by dozens of fellow employees. These can take the form of:
+1-800-555-5555 PIN 12345678
+4597979797 Code 123456
Most smartphones will pick up on the phone numbers and make it easy to dial it, but then you usually have to memorize the PIN or access code.
The tel URL scheme
Luckily for us some smart people (it appears from Nokia) way back in 2000 took the idea to extend the URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) ideas from the internet and add the “tel”, “fax”, and “modem” scheme. Much in the some way we use “http”, “https”, and “ftp” in our web sites today for links. Please see the original RFC2806 and the later RFC3966 for all the gory details.
So today many web browsers natively support these URIs schemes as well. And this goes down to the mobile device level, with for example Mobile Internet Explorer and Safari. Blackberry and Symbian devices appear to support it natively as well.
The main one we are interested in for this exercise is the “tel:” URI.
How to set it up
So to use this it’s more of educating the end-users who setup the conference calls to use the proper formatting in the meeting invitations. If using Outlook and using HTML formatting, as soon as you type in a string with “TEL:” and number behind it will automatically make it a hyperlink. Many may already be familiar with this as well for desktop SIP/VoIP solutions such as Microsoft’s, as it will use your Communicator client and dial the number in the TEL: URL.
Most phone systems will also honor the “,” character as being a 1 sec pause. So you could after the TEL: URL place the conference bridge phone number and the PIN/access code and the “#” symbol all in one string.
Some examples: – please note no spaces should be used!
TEL:1-800-555-5555,12345678#
TEL:+1-555-555-5555,,12345#,1
How to use it
On the mobile device it will render the TEL: string on the screen and it most cases (depending on the string, device platform, device software) make it a hyperlink that the end-user can click on and have the phone immediately dial out the string! No need to memorize the PIN/access code in most cases!
This can really be a “life saver” for the mobile professional. You can forego the need to perhaps write down the PIN/access code etc. Of course I don’t recommend trying to dial into a conference while driving a vehicle, but I’m sure many of your users probably have and then this could literally be a life saver as well..
Screen shots - and gotchas
Windows Mobile 6.5.5 device - nice and easy to dial the complete string from your calendar:
(screen shot captured by using MyMobiler)
BlackBerry Bold - Easy to use as expected:
(screen shot captured by using SnapScreen)
iPhone 3GS – a major gotcha where in the calendar it doesn’t seem supported, where as in Safari it is. :-( However, automatic detection of standalone number strings does take place.
(Screen capture using the built-in feature available since 2.0)
Palm Pre webOS 1.3.1 – Also here the Tel: schema is having issues where it doesn’t know where to end the hyperlink. Advise here would be make sure no text is after the string.
(Using the orange-symbol-P key trick for screen capture)
Recommendation and recap
Based upon the information gathered on the platforms I had at hand above, my recommendation if your environment has all of them is to communicate conference bridge instructions to embed the following example in the end-users invitations so most platforms are catered to and usable:
Direct conference bridge access:
TEL:1-800-555-5555,12345678#
Manual dialing instructions:
1-800-555-5555
Passcode: 12345678#
I hope this may help some corporate situations and employees make better use out of their devices and each others! It clearly shows that if you do notify your users about this feature make sure you understand the platforms in use and the differences you may encounter supporting them..
If someone has a Symbian and Android device/emulator it would be interesting to see the results from those platforms too! Also if folks have various VoIP/SIP implementations other gaps that may be found there..
|\\arco..