kishorebhargava

Love it or hate it we do have to make these conf calls, while we cannot as yet automate participation, I do have a simple process of making the call…

Business these days demands participation at a global level. This of course poses several challenges least of which is dealing with multiple people across multiple timezones. Corporations found what they assume to be a simple solution, the inevitable “conference call”. Whether you work for a bank, an IT firm, a law firm or any firm for that matter, in order to collaborate with your colleagues you need to join these dreaded calls.

The process of joining the calls is not always simple, the number to dial is typically a toll-free number and therefore long or in many cases just an international number so still long enough. While the number itself can definitely be stored in the address book of the phone, the problem comes with issuing a conference ID and participant or moderator code.

I did not find a easy way of storing those so that it could be sent at the right time. These are DTMF code sequences which ideally need to be dialed and cannot be cut and pasted into the dialer. Besides, once on a call, most phones do not seem to have a method of sending DTMF tones other than bringing up the dial pad and allowing entry on that.

On my Nokia N900 I found a great little app called “conference manager” that allowed me to automate the process. It lets you define the number to be called, the time to pause for the welcome message and then enter the conference id or passcode. It works totally brilliantly. While I could not figure out how it was doing this, it did remind me of days of old, when dialing with a modem all one needed to do was insert a “comma” or a “pause” along with the phone number. A single comma would typically insert a 2 second pause.

Using the same theory, I decided to test this on my current phone a Nokia C7. Interestingly, on the dial pad the *+ key inserts a pause for you. First press gets you a *, second press gets you a +, third press gets you a p and finally a fourth gets you a w. The w used to be a “wait” on the modem and it basically waits till a key is pressed. I have not yet tested that but I guess I will eventually get around to that too.

So heres an example of how I would dial a service (in this case, sabsebolo.com). The New Delhi access number is +911166194444 my conference ID is 1234567 and conference PIN is 1234 to store the entire sequence and have it dial automatically on my phone here is what I did:

+911166194444pppppppppppp1234567#pp1234#

It works like a charm.

I had tweeted about this a while ago, but when I never got a reaction to the tweet I realised that the 140 character limitation did not let me explain what I was doing and hence nobody understood the tweet. This morning Aseem sent me a tweet asking me for the syntax. The answer was this blog post. Hope this helps!

I did discover that on an iPhone there is no *+ key but there is a pause key in the dialpad and that inserts a comma. Would be curious to know what others experience with their phones.

While I don’t expect you to enjoy the calls, at least dialing in and logging on is painless and can be done hands-free!

Cheers…Kishore
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