Since late 1998, I have had the pleasure of working with the wonderful folks at OnHoldAdvertising! The husband and wife team of Brent Brace and Karen Kelly have produced literally millions of voice prompts for thousands of systems throughout the American Business Communications landscape. Karen can be heard on more automated attendants and voice mail […]
Call Center or Contact Center? Call Centers had no sooner become “Contact” Centers when multimedia “nice to have” features became “must have” requirements. The more mobile the customer base, the more likely they are on a smart phone and not sitting at a desk computer. They want “contact”, however they want to communicate. That used […]
A question that keeps coming up in the support ticket system is the subject of InGate and Session Border Controllers. Folks want to know if you need a SBC to configure a SIP trunk. Why not just use a Firewall? Can you configure ShoreTel SIP trunks to work without a SBC? The simple answer is […]
Most folks seem to understand what a firewall is and why it is so very important. They intuitively understand they need something between the “trusted” internal computer network, and the wild west we call the Internet! The installation of a firewall is generally something all business do, from the wireless network at the local coffee […]
ShoreTel SIP is just not that hard to configure! When things go right, and it all works, it is relatively painless and very easy. When things don't work however, you will need to sort out the problem and figure out how to make it work. The good news is that SIP is a clear text, […]
We have been working around the call center space for a long time. Actually, it is our first love! Does everyone need a full blown Contact Center? If you have a real boiler room operation, with shifts of agents that are heavily manged, counted, recorded, measured complete with staff forecasting and multiple channels of client […]
We see a lot of VoIP deployments that come to us for trouble shooting. A common problem statement is that our HQ site can call both Chicago and Dallas, but Dallas and Chicago can't call each other. Savvy network administrator will have figured out that there is a routing issue, but how so? Clearly HQ […]
We see a lot of VoIP deployments that come to us for trouble shooting. A common problem statement is that our HQ site can call both Chicago and Dallas, but Dallas and Chicago can't call each other. Savvy network administrator will have figured out that there is a routing issue, but how so? Clearly HQ […]
Our older posts on this subject are getting a bit dated and an update is long over due. ShoreTel has been using a version of SIP since day one. We say a version of SIP because at the formation of ShoreTel, SIP standards had not yet been solidified. ShoreTel SIP, therefor, was not interoperable nor […]
A quick review of vocabulary before we go into this subject any further. First when we refer to vSphere, we are talking about the entire VMware ecosystem and all of its components. It is just a short hand for the entire system solution. ESXi is a VMware hypervisor. It is the "host" hardware on which […]
A simple yet very effective step you can take to assure a high availability is all but free! It occurs to us that it is no longer acceptable to install ShoreTel on anything other than a VMware ESXi server! Lets face it, you have to purchase a hardware package to host your server regardless of […]
What is a “peer to peer” call center? The concept is a fully functioning call center that exists only in the internet browser of the workgroup agents and supervisor participating. In fact, no telephone lines are needed, beyond the published customer service number. There is no large internal LAN network. No complex phone configuration, not […]