facebook rss twitter

Review: Online Call Manager (OCM)

by David Ross on 7 September 2000, 00:00

Tags: Call Manager Online

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qabv

Add to My Vault: x

Online Call Manager (OCM)

Call Manager is a little program that is designed to overcome the problem of you not being able to receive phone calls while you are online with a modem.

How does it work?

What you need to set up call diversion on your phone, for which there is normally a charge from your phone company. Having created an account with OCM, you divert calls to a number they give you, which in turn forwards the incoming call on to you on-screen in the client. When a call comes in, you hear a ringing tone on your computer’s speakers and it flashes on-screen. At this point you have three options:

Hang up your Internet connection and take the call on your phone as normal.

Divert the call to one of a predefined list of other numbers, for example your mobile phone.

Take the call over the Internet using a microphone and PC speakers – this works by diverting the voice operations to MS Netmeeting, while the person on the other end can still use their normal phone.

The program itself is free. You will have to pay for call diversion on your phone, and the only other charge is 10 pence for each diverted call.

There is one outstandingly huge problem with this program that makes it unsuitable for most gamers – the client program prevents full-screen 3D graphics from working in both D3D and OGL. Graphics will still work in a window, but as most people know this is much slower and not satisfactory. Other than that, it works fairly well. I have had problems at times connecting to the server, but it has been resolved by them getting in touch with my ISP, whose Exchange server sometimes gets a port conflict with it. You only get about 4 rings to decide what to do, so you need to be pretty quick getting to it, but the options above all work about as well as you would expect. Voice over IP is of course a bit pants with a 56k modem, as anyone who has used Netmeeting will know, but it is better than hanging up in certain situations. There is a feature to use the Voice over IP feature to call other OCM users directly, but it is little more than a nice front-end for standard Netmeeting connections. If you don’t use this program all the time as it means a reboot to play games. It is very handy however if I know I am going to be ICQing or downloading for a long stretch and don’t want to miss calls. Whether it is worth registering for at this point in time is a moot point. V92 modems are just around the corner, which apparently has the ability to accept calls while you are online, making this redundant. Overall, it’s not perfect, but it works.

You can get more info and downloads at www.ocmuk.com