Audio conferencing for church

[engin411]

I am a long time 3CX user - I administer it at work. Working on a voice project for my church, and naturally want to use 3CX because I find it easy to administer. However, we don't use the conferencing at work, so I am not familiar with it in 3CX.

The church uses another, external service that allows members to call a phone number and then enter a PIN to be connected to the audio feed from the church's mixer board.

That same concept is what we want, but - this is where I am not sure about the 3CX world - is this how the conferencing feature works in 3CX? And is this included in the free 2call edition? Can the PIN be the same for all callers (as many are elderly and don't have email in order to receive an emailed PIN). Is there any limit to how many callers can call in to connect to the conference call?

I appreciate any input. Thanks.

 

[lneblett]

The call conference can indeed handle a PIN code which is for the conference itself. You can hold multiple conferences at the same time and each would/could have its own code. They simply dial the conference extension (700?) and enter the PIN which then connects to the associated conference.

The total number of participants is 64, regardless of the number of conferences, so one might have 63 attendees leaving only 1 for the other conferences.

Unfortunately, the conferences do require licences as you are dialing into the PBX.

 

[engin411]

Thanks. So you're saying, in regard to licensing, that if the church has a dozen members calling in, they need to buy the $1395 16 SC edition?

 

[leejor]

Yes

It might be worth doing a search for a more economical device(or service) made specifically for the purpose you are attempting to set-up.

One thing to keep in mind when dealing with conferences, especially made with non-business type phones, there is generally no way to mute the handset. So...whatever you offer has to be a one-way audio service, you don't want everyone to be able to hear everyone else. It's bad enough in a business situation when one user forgets to mute their set, with residential callers.....

 

[engin411]

Yes indeed on the one-way/mute, thank you.

 

[Frank D]

I would suggest using a dedicated hosted service with dial-numbers. Some of those services are free to use or the person dialling in pays a fee for the call to special number. Maybe streaming the audio via some Web-Radio tool would be an alternative. Every Smartphone or PC could listen into the stream.

 

[engin411]

Thanks for the ideas and comments, guys. In our case, our first priority is a normal audio conference, as the callers tend to be elderly folks that are not comfortable with smartphone/tablet/computer.
But we are still working on the "web radio" concept too to allow any device to listen at any time. But we are chasing the dial-in setup first.

I agree about 3CX, unfortunately, it doesn't make any sense to use it for this.

Thanks.