Thursday, August 02, 2007

Easy Conference Calling

A few times each year I need to arrange a conference call with people from other parts of the country. Very occasionally I need to arrange a conference call with people from all around the world. ConferenceUK is the easiest and cheapest solution I have found to date.

Once you have established a free account you login and schedule the start time for your conference. You can either pay for the total cost of the conference yourself (callers are allocated a freephone number to ring) or callers pay for their own call (approximately 5p per minute). Each conference can be scheduled to have a maximum of 100 participants and to last for a maximum of 3 hours.

Once the conference is scheduled the system allocates members a number to ring and a security code. What I found particularly impressive about the system is its ease of use and its flexibility. For example, if you have the email addresses of the participants in your account address book, you just select them and the system will email all participants with the start time, number to call, and security code. I have found ConferenceUK to be simple, hassle-free, reasonably cheap, and effective.