About the Virtual Reception IVR service

The Virtual Reception IVR service allows participants to use DTMF tones to select the Virtual Meeting Room they wish to join. It provides an alternative means to access Virtual Meeting Rooms for participants who cannot dial VMR aliases directly.

Generally, in order to access a Virtual Meeting Room, participants dial one of the Virtual Meeting Room's alias directly from their endpoint. However, some conference participants may not be able to do this. Reasons might include:

• The participant's endpoint might not support dialing by URI - they can only dial by IP address.
• The participant might be using an audio-only PSTN telephone and can only make calls to direct dial numbers.
• Your enterprise might have a limited number of direct dial numbers that can be used for audio participants, and you do not want to allocate one per VMR.
• Your enterprise uses local, toll-free telephone numbers that audio-only users can dial to access your VMRs and you don't want to have one of these for every VMR in your enterprise.

To allow for such cases, Pexip Infinity enables you to set up a single direct dial number or IP address that participants can dial to access a single, central Virtual Reception. From here they can use the DTMF tones on their endpoint to enter the number of the specific VMR they want to join.

To implement this you must:

1. Create and configure your Virtual Reception.
2. Ensure that every Virtual Meeting Room that you want to be accessible from the Virtual Reception has at least one alias that consists of digits only. For more information, see Using multiple aliases to access the same service.
3. Provide conference participants with the combination of Virtual Reception alias followed by the Virtual Auditorium or Virtual Meeting Room number that they must dial to access the conference.

Using the Virtual Reception with the Pexip Distributed Gateway

You can also use the Virtual Reception to route calls via the Pexip Distributed Gateway. This would allow you, for example, to route phone calls towards a Cisco VCS as E.164 numbers, or to join scheduled and ad hoc Lync / Skype for Business AVMCU conferences.

If your environment includes a PSTN gateway or uses an ITSP (Internet telephony service provider), consider the potential for toll fraud if you have Gateway Routing Rules that can route calls to the PSTN gateway or ITSP, or if you allow conference participants to dial out to other participants via the PSTN gateway or ITSP. See PSTN gateways and toll fraud for more information.

Routing phone calls towards a Cisco VCS as E.164 numbers

To implement this you must:

1. Create and configure your Virtual Reception in the normal way.
2. Configure a Gateway Routing Rule that matches the desired E.164 pattern and then routes the call via the specified Cisco VCS (where the Cisco VCS is the SIP proxy or H.323 gatekeeper as specified in the rule).

   Ensure that the E.164 pattern does not match a Virtual Meeting Room alias (as Virtual Meeting Room routing takes precedence).

Now, if someone dials in to the Virtual Reception and then enters the E.164 number that matches the Gateway Routing Rule, their call will be routed via the Cisco VCS.

Joining scheduled and ad hoc Lync / Skype for Business AVMCU conferences

See Configuring Pexip Infinity as a Lync / Skype for Business gateway for instructions on how to do this.