There are numerous software applications and hardware products in the market that store and track information concerning a meeting or conversation.
For example, one such software application is an electronic calendar that may be used to store the time, length, topic, and the participants of a conference. This conference may be a telephone conversation, a live meeting, or an electronic conference via a person's computer.
Another such application is a personal information manager (PIM) that is used widely to record notes and minutes from telephone discussions and/or conversations. PIms also can be used to record the participant's telephone number. A PIM user can quickly obtain information about another party, their telephone number, and a summary of a previous conversation. If a PIM is Telephone Application Programming Interface (TAPI) compatible, then the PIM can place a telephone call on behalf of the user.
There also exist hardware products on the market that will connect up multiple participants for a conference. For example, a telephone bridge can host a multi-party telephone conversation. The various participants call into the telephone bridge and the bridge acts as a host to connect each of the participants into a telephone conference.
Another example is a Multi-Point Control Unit (MCU), which is installed into a computer system. The MCU schedules and initiates telephone conferences between multiple parties. To reserve a "MCU slot", users specify the proposed start time, length and the participants of a desktop conference. The MCU captures this information and stores it as a reservation record. This reservation record is accessible to the computer system and may be used to establish a desktop conference.
Although there have been major strides in this area of software applications to track information about conferences, there are major disadvantages of all the above-mentioned products and/or applications.
First, none of the above discussed systems is adapted to store all the essential characteristics of a desktop conference. Second, none of the above systems allows the user to store all important characteristics of a conference prior to a conference or at any point during a live conference. Third, none of the above systems enables a user to access and retrieve those conference characteristics and automatically resume a prior conference.