Announcements

Typical conferencing services prompt a user to record his name, business name, or possibly location when dialing in to a meeting from the PSTN, and then the user can play that recorded greeting as he enters or leaves the conference. In Lync Server, where a visual roster is available to all participants, the need for this service is greatly diminished and can become a distraction to the actual meeting as attendees enter and leave.

Organizers can enable or disable the announcement service on a per-meeting basis, and it is disabled by default. Attendees who dial in from a PSTN telephone and want to hear a roster might use Dual-Tone Multi-Frequency (DTMF) tones to request a roll call, which is played only to the attendee. Additionally, the conferencing service aggregates announcements when batches of users enter or leave at the same time and make an announcement such as “Eight users are leaving” instead of announcing each user individually.