Cisco Cisco Unified MeetingPlace Audio Server Maintenance Manual

Cisco MeetingServer 5.1 System Manager’s Guide   

 

                  12 

 

Cisco Systems 

 

March 2003 

MeetingPlace lecture-style meetings are based on the concept that there are 
one or more speakers and the remaining participants are listeners and not 
granted speaking ability. While scheduling a lecture-style meeting, the 
meeting controller can use the Lecture Meeting Attend Settings parameter to 
specify how they want listen-only participants to attend the meeting. This 
parameter contains the following choices:  

•

 

Automatically enables all participants to enter the 

meeting via the meeting room with their speaking ability turned off. 
Meeting controllers can “Open the floor” at any time to allow for 
general discussion (such as in a town meeting application). 

•

 

Automatically enables all participants to 

enter the meeting via the waiting room where they can listen to on-hold 
music plus any meeting announcements the moderator may have 
recorded. This option allows speakers to converse in private in the main 
meeting room before beginning the meeting.  

When the moderators are ready to start the meeting they can “Call the 
meeting to order” and bring all the waiting room participants into the 
meeting. Participants will automatically have their speaking ability 
turned off until the moderator chooses to “Open the floor”. 

•

 

Automatically enables all participants to 

enter the meeting via the meeting room with their speaking ability turned 
on. When the meeting is set to begin, the meeting controller can “Close 
the floor” and thereby turn off participants’ speaking ability. 

 

Note: Speaking ability is tied to whether or not the floor is open 
or closed. If, however, users mute themselves while the floor is 
closed and enter a breakout session the mute feature will not 
take effect until the floor is re-opened. Therefore, if users return 
to a main meeting where the floor has been re-opened, they may 
find that they are still “muted” from their earlier request. 

For increased efficiency, it is recommended that you schedule large 
meetings

any meeting involving more than 100 participantsas lecture-

style rather than “all speaker” meetings. When scheduling large meetings, 
ensure that all entry/departure announcements are set to “Silent” and that 
the roll call feature is disabled.  

In large lecture-style meetings, when multiple participants initiate a request 
to ask a question, coordination becomes important. Each request must be 
served on a first-come, first-served basis.