Conferencing systems allow a number of participants to electronically communicate with a number of other participants. Conferencing systems, especially when facilitating a conference with a large number of participants, become very burdensome to manage. As provided by certain embodiments described herein, endpoint data channels (e.g., audio, video, data, etc.) may be selectively enabled or disabled during a conference, as well as, the connecting of certain endpoints to enable sidebar conversations, based upon a group operation. The group is statically or dynamically determined by commonality of a participant attribute. A group-based conferencing operation then allows for simultaneous actions to be performed on the subset of conference participants without one-by-one operations.