Instant Conferencing Solution
An embeddable solution to communication-enable applications

Telephone conferencing is primarily used for official meetings within the enterprise environment. The usability and call flow for conferencing requires several steps for it to be efficient and effective.

	Scheduling – It takes a good amount of scheduling across participants’ calendars to confirm availability.
	Participants join explicitly – The success of the conference depends on the individuals joining at the right time as per schedule. An efficient reminder mechanism needs to ensure that participants act in a timely fashion.
	Coordinator calling participants – If any participant does not show up; the coordinator has to call their number explicitly to join them in.

The elaborate call flow for enterprise conferencing has so far prevented wide-spread adoption of conferencing as an effective means of group communication. Moreover, conferencing based on such call-flows makes typical conferencing services unsuitable for creating communication enabled business processes. GS Lab’s Instant Conferencing Solution (ICS) takes out the scheduling and explicit ‘call in/out’ to make conferencing instantaneous and easy to deploy for day to day enterprise business processes.

At the core of ICS is a ‘Group Call’ mechanism, where a real life group can be addressed by a natural name for initiating a conference call within its members. From a pure phone call perspective ‘Group Call’ brings the ease of a single call to initiate a multiparty conference.

ICS has been built with the following key characteristics:

	Foundation of a formal Group Call semantics
	Hosted solution with an embeddable interface for multiple enterprise call flows
	Programmable provisioning and management capabilities
	Flexible and programmable call Initiation and management facilities
	Device and location agnostic with least cost routing
	Services accessible over multiple communication mediums like cell phones, SMS, web email and more
	billing, reporting and troubleshooting capabilities useful for the subscribers as well as the system administrators
	Regulatory requirements such as lawful intercepts

ICS has been designed such that it can be accessed from web applications for inserting the group call semantics into the application logic. The ICS service has the interfaces to work with the 3rd party data.