The Mysteriously Changing Conference ID

A new feature in Office Communications Server 2007 R2 is PSTN dial-in to audio conferences. (OCS 2007 had audio conferencing. It just didn’t have an attendant to which you could dial-in, provide a conference ID, and be placed in the right conference.)

The most important features of a traditional reservationless audio bridge are provided by OCS. One of these important features is a conference ID that represents your personal audio conference. (You can have unique conference IDs for each of your calls. But, the default option when you schedule a meeting simply uses your assigned conference ID.)

I had a colleague recently tell me that her assigned OCS conference ID kept changing. This was wreaking havoc with her meetings because, for no apparent reason, the ID that the meeting was created with had become invalid.

I just learned this was another bug that was (at least partially) addressed in the OCS QFE released last week. The problem is with the Conferencing Add-in for Outlook. When you delete one occurrence of a recurring meeting that uses your default conference ID, the add-in mistakenly sends a command to delete that conference ID. This will make all the meetings that use that conference ID invalid.

The real fix will be made in some future version of the Conferencing Add-in. In the mean time, with these fixes, the server will ignore the incorrect conference delete commands. Now you can schedule OCS conference calls and be confident that your ID will work when you need it.

--Doug

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Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Great post, not sure if was exactly the issue I was seeing today, but a reset of my conference ID got me back up and running... now to see if it happens again...