Patent ID: 7991137

Claim:
A system to facilitate phone conferencing between a plurality of phone users over a communications network, the system comprising: an administration server being accessible by the communications network to host the phone conferencing, the administration server having a processor and memory coupled to the processor to store operating instructions therein; and a conferencing management program product stored in the memory of the administration server to facilitate phone conferencing between users on the system, the conferencing management program product including instructions that, when executed by the administration server, causes the administration server to perform the operations of: receiving an incoming call from a first user on the system; identifying the first user; determining whether the first user is authorized to initiate a conference call; retrieving data relating to the first user, the data including a set of conference participation preferences selected by the first user; initiating the conference call according to the set of participation preferences selected by the first user; wherein the set of conference participation preferences comprises a file grouping of a plurality of secondary users selected by the first user to be included in the conference call, the first user being permitted to set parameters for each secondary user in the file grouping, and wherein the conferencing management program product further includes instructions that, when executed by the administration server, causes the administration server to perform the operations of: identifying the secondary users in the file grouping; and alerting a subset of the secondary users in the file grouping of the conference call via the communications network; wherein the set of conference participation preferences further comprises: a preference permitting the first user to create multiple file groupings of secondary users; and a preference permitting the first user to set protocols for merging a plurality of file groupings together.