Patent ID: 8150014

Claim:
A system for effecting transition of a private branch exchange (PBX) system-hosted voice only telephone session in progress into a new voice session enhanced with a data collaboration channel comprising: a call escalation system (CES) application for determining call state of the voice session to be transitioned and for executing a sequence of command requests for effecting the transition based on a trigger event provided by a participant in the voice only telephone session interacting with a PBX telephone used in the session; computer telephony integration (CTI) software executing in the CES application for controlling the PBX switch; and a conference bridge for hosting voice and data communications; wherein in response to the trigger event the voice only telephone session is transferred to the conference bridge and the data collaboration channel is an Internet connection linked to the voice session and the conference bridge hosts both the voice and data collaboration channel providing a single control interface to participating users for controlling the voice session and the data collaboration channel.