Patent ID: 8838699

Claim:
A policy based Web conference provisioning system comprising: a policy manager executing in memory by a processor of a general purpose computing system, the policy manager being coupled to at least two different Web conferencing platforms over a computer communications network, said policy manager comprising a set of computer program instructions that when executed by the processor receive a Web conference request, pose to a communicatively linked end user sending the Web conference request, a set of questions, the set of questions representing selection criteria for determining a platform for hosting a Web conference, the selection criteria includes a number of participants to the Web conference, whether the participants are internal or external to a private network of the end user, a set of features desired for use during the Web conference, a security level required for the Web conference, and a priority of the Web conference, receive answers to the posed set of questions, retrieve one or more policies, each of the one or more policies specifying an appropriate platform selection based upon the answers received to the posed set of questions representing selection criteria, process both the retrieved one or more policies and also the received answers to the set of questions to identify the platform for hosting the Web conference, re-establish said selection criteria and process said retrieved one or more policies and also said re-established selection criteria to identify different platform for hosting said Web conference.