External Conference Line

[Patrick OLeary]

I am currently evaluating 3CX for company use. It seems great. The one thing I am unsure of is whether we can use it as a replacement for join.me / GoToMeeting. Our company is a services firm and we hold many, many, many calls with external clients. This can range from one on one calls, to simple conference calls, to large conference calls, to large conference calls / screen share meetings. When we hold these meetings, we typically use a service like GoToMeeting. It was hoping that with 3CX that we would be able to schedule these types of meetings with external callers. From what I read, it seems like you could provide external users an internal extension to call and be joined to the meeting, but that takes up your licenses. At times, we could have 50 external users on a call, thus it would be cost prohibitive for us to have that many licenses.

Any thoughts on how 3CX can help with this situation? Or maybe it can't?

 

[YiannisH_3CX]

Hello @Patrick OLeary

Please note that conference participants take up one simultaneous licence each so you need to get a licence that fits your needs. But Webmeeting has its own licence count that does not affect the simultaneous calls of the PBX. The Pro version includes 100 participants count
https://www.3cx.com/ordering/pricing/

 

[Patrick OLeary]

Hello @Patrick OLeary

Please note that conference participants take up one simultaneous licence each so you need to get a licence that fits your needs. But Webmeeting has its own licence count that does not affect the simultaneous calls of the PBX. The Pro version includes 100 participants count
https://www.3cx.com/ordering/pricing/

Hmmm, ok. So, there would be two licensing purchases then. 1) for the PBX internal simultaneous calls 2) for the Webmeeting which the Pro membership gets you up to 100 people joining any single call? How about multiple calls simultaneously? Does each call get you up to 100?

With the web meeting, would we be able to do the following:
- Any internal user can start a web meeting on demand to either talk, screen share, video chat with any other internal user.
- Any internal user can schedule a meeting with internal and external users up to 100 attendees that can include phone, screen share and / or video. Internal Users can either dial in via 3cx voip on machine, or use an phone number to call from a phone. External users can dial in via a phone number to connect to the call, or join using voip and screen share through browser. The internal user would be able to create the meeting request and send through Outlook.

Is that accurate? If so, I'd like to install all of this yesterday.

I setup a 3CX trial using your Google cloud. Is it possible to test all of these features out? If so, let me know how I can do so.

 

[Patrick OLeary]

And if someone wants to call direct to talk through it, that would be fine as well. Just let me know.

 

[pitrickzul]

Currently the webmeeting system only supports video connections. The call-in feature for webmeetings is in development. You can initiate video meetings with internal or external with up to 100 people simultaneously. Note that this 100 limit is for your entire company, it's not 100 per meeting. If you have 3 meetings currently running with 50 people in them total, your 4th meeting can only hold 50 people max.

So for now, if you need a large quantity of available calls for audio only meetings, you need to get a bigger licence.

 

[Patrick OLeary]

OK. That's the biggest thing that we need. If there was a way to combine 3CX with a solution like Zoom, GTM, WebEx, etc. that would be an incredible solution all from one place. You're saying we can do that today, but we would have to have external users dial into an internal number and use a license, meaning we would need to buy a lot of licenses. Right?

 

[YiannisH_3CX]

You will have to calculate what is the maximum number of calls you are running simultaneously so you can decide the licence size you need. The webmeeting participants are not a different licence and there is no extra charge. They are included in the licence.
As mentioned above the ability to phone in to a webmeeting session is still in development.

 

[Patrick OLeary]

Is there any timing on the web meeting? It looks like its been in the road map for most of this year.

 

[YiannisH_3CX]

Is there any timing on the web meeting? It looks like its been in the road map for most of this year.

I am not aware of an exact release date or version. Please keep an eye on our blog post for future feature releases or the PBX change log for a list of changes that follow each release.
https://www.3cx.com/blog/
https://www.3cx.com/blog/change-log/