A fault came in today from a customer who was having problems scheduling conferences with dial-in access numbers when using Webscheduler. While the meeting was scheduled correctly and a URL was given to join the meeting, a dial-in access number wasn’t shown. Here’s a recreation I did in my lab, so enjoy the pretend numbers and URLs:

This was confusing, because a number was definitely configured for dial-in conferencing. But there was a slight problem:

The number on the customer’s system was a 1300 number – for those outside Australia, it’s like a toll-free number, but it’s the cost of a local call to the caller, and the owner of the number pays for the call costs beyond the standard local call time. As most business calls are quite short, this usually works out in the 1300 number owner’s favour.

Anyhoo, it turns out that a little while ago a junior engineer had taken the ticket to remove the existing state-based numbers and replace them with a single number for all of Australia. He created a new conference region for the new number and attached it to the Global dial plan. He then changed the region for the 1300 number from “Sydney” to “Australia” and deleted the rest. Seems logical.

But the problem comes for users attempting to create meetings. In this case, my user is set with the AU-MEL dial plan as I’m in Melbourne:

and when we investigate that dial plan policy:

We find that it wasn’t updated when the “Melbourne” conferencing region was deleted to make way for the Australia-wide one. As a result, Skype can’t give the user a number as it doesn’t believe it has one in that region.

The solution? Either change all the dial plans to “Australia” as their conferencing region, or add all regions to the dial-in access number. I chose the first option, as I didn’t want to see multiple regions listed on the dialin page.

After that, a quick enable-cscomputer to kick things into gear:

Now when we create a meeting, all the correct information is shown.

Happy conferencing!