Thame, Oxon, UK & Paris, France: 27 September 2011 – MeetingZone builds on its success in Germany, the UK and North America, by today launching its conferencing and collaboration services portfolio to French businesses of all sizes, across all sectors.

"For the first time, businesses across France will be able to quickly and easily sign up for MeetingZone's self service, audio and web conferencing and collaboration services through its fully automated conferencing portal which has been developed and designed by MeetingZone to exactly meet customer requirements," explained conferencing expert Jean-Francois Raffestin, whose consulting Company is working with MeetingZone on the roll out of its services in France.

There are absolutely no set-up fees and new accounts are activated immediately so customers can start making conference calls at once.

"The fully automated self-service functionality of MeetingZone's online conferencing portal enables customers to quickly and simply plan, activate, monitor, manage and control audio and web conferencing sessions themselves with just a few simple mouse clicks," continued Raffestin.

Customers can quickly set up or join an integrated conferencing and collaboration session, view participant names, e-mail addresses and company names, record the conference, switch to screen sharing or presentation mode, mute and un-mute participants, hold group or one-to-one chat sessions via an Instant Messaging function, hold Q&A sessions and much more.

Taking into account the current tough economic climate, MeetingZone understands the importance of delivering cost effective services.

"We have launched the service with a special online sign-up offer and unlike other providers MeetingZone does not round up the length of a conference call to the nearest minute. We charge per second so our customers pay for exactly what they have used and nothing more!" added Raffestin.

Another way in which MeetingZone keeps conferencing calls low is by providing local dial-in numbers which eliminate the cost of expensive international calls.

A key differentiator for MeetingZone is its completely transparent online billing system. Accessed through the conferencing portal MeetingZone's customers can, at any time, accurately monitor and manage their conferencing costs. MeetingZone's ability to allocate call charges to individual departments, projects or users, ensures complex company invoicing structures covering multiple cost centres can easily be accommodated. This functionality means that there are no surprises for customers when they receive their fully detailed electronic invoices.

Another feature of MeetingZone's service which helps its customers monitor and manage their conferencing call costs is its 'After Call Email' which is sent to the conference host after each call. This e-mail details the date and time of the call, the duration, the number of participants, the number from which the participants called into the call, and the total minutes/seconds used.

To meet the increasing demand from users to share information during a conferencing and collaboration session, MeetingZone offers a range of web conferencing solutions including MeetingZone Glance, IBM Presenter and Cisco WebEx.

Security features from MeetingZone include Roll Call functionality allowing the conference host to verify that only authorised participants are present and ‘lock’ calls preventing any unauthorised participants joining conference sessions.

MeetingZone has always been a customer driven company with a strong reputation for delivering the highest levels of customer service in the conferencing and collaboration market. This is reflected with MeetingZone's services in France being supported by a 24/7/365 customer support team.

"As one of the biggest conferencing and collaboration marketplaces in Europe, the French market is very important to MeetingZone. We believe that French businesses have been waiting for audio and web conferencing services which have been specifically developed to remove all the complexity associated with deployment. We have the right service offering at the right time as this is precisely what MeetingZone delivers!" commented Tim Duffy, MeetingZone's Chairman.

MeetingZone's ethos has always been to develop technology that makes its audio and web conferencing services easy to use. It has always put its customers first by putting them in control of how they want to conference and collaborate with others.

"The launch of its French service is simply the next stage of MeetingZone's goal to drive the widespread adoption of integrated conferencing and collaboration solutions," concluded Raffestin.