Abstract: It is known in the prior art to, when a telephone customer is unavailable to take a call, page the customer, thereby notifying the customer that a telephone call is waiting. The customer may then call in to a meet-me bridge to be connected to the incoming telephone call. However, if the customer does not respond to the page in time, prior art systems provide for the calling party's call to be routed to an alternate destination, e.g., a voice messaging system. The calling party's telephone call is thereby considered completed. If the customer thereafter becomes available, the customer is not connected to the caller's telephone call even if the caller is still connected to the alternate destination.

Abstract: A pool of multimedia servers, which may be geographically diverse, are available to be allocated to serve one of at least two ELANs served by an ELAN contronect network. These multimedia servers are a) connected to, b) dynamically allocated to sub-ELANs, and c) managed by, a multimedia server manager, which is included as part of the ELAN contronect network. In particular, each of the multimedia servers is capable of having its addresses dynamically reconfigured in response to commands from the multimedia server manager to match that of an ELAN to which it is being made available, so that the multimedia server becomes a part of that ELAN. The multimedia server manager obtains a layer-3 address from address server 427 of the ELAN contronect network which it then assigns to the multimedia server so that the multimedia server appears to be a part of the ELAN to which it is assigned to serve.