Author: DrVoIP

Peter S. Buswell (aka DrVoIP) is a rare blend of C-level executive leadership and deep technical expertise in telecommunications and cloud infrastructure. With a career that began at AT&T in 1970, he has founded and led multiple industry-defining companies, including Dextr.Cloud—acquired by AWS Global Partner CloudHesive. Peter has held senior roles at firms like Exxon Enterprises, Intervoice/Brite, and Franklin Telecommunications, and has consistently driven innovation from traditional PBX to Amazon Connect cloud deployments. A hands-on architect with certifications from Cisco (CCNP/CCDP, UCCX/UCCE) and AWS (Solutions Architect, Developer, SysOps), he combines strategic vision with engineering precision. Known as DrVoIP, he continues to bridge the gap between enterprise goals and technical execution in today’s evolving cloud communications landscape.

Holiday Check script is a great learning tool!

Posted on April 24, 2014 by DrVoIP

Most VoIP Engineers are not necessarily Software Engineers, so bringing up a Contact Center and scripting it are usually done by two different types of engineers. Scripting engineers tend to have backgrounds in software development with formal education in programming structure and practices. A solid experience in Java, PHP, Perl, SQL and other languages is very different that having a background in IP networking, telecommunications, QOS and MPLS! That is not to say their are not Engineers that can do it all, but you can either be a mile wide and an inch deep or an inch wide and a mile deep! You can’t be an expert in everything!

Scripting a Contact Center using the CISCO UCCX editor and related tools is an area of specialization. Most engineers carry around a basic set of “start up” scripts to get a new UCCX off the ground, but most clients have contact center requirements that require CRM, Website and advance database integration that requires some additional depth of expertise in the area of software development. Altering call flow based on external data elements is an essential part of any contact center today. The need to retrieve data from sources outside of the script, or to update sources once the script completes has become the minimum daily adult requirement for contact center scripting!

There is a HolidayCheck script that has been kicking around the CISCO UCCX landscape forever. We first saw it in the Windows based UCCX before Version 8+. It is actually a great script as it demonstrates a number of Java elements that are outside the normal cut and paste scripting ability of many newbies. You will need to understand XML, Xpath, String Manipulation, Date Contractors and some other advanced data handling options that this script uses to modify call flow based on the day being a holiday or not. For this reason, it makes for an excellent learning tool if you want to get in their and dig into the details.

The Script uses a simple XML data file containing a list of dates that are declared to be Holidays. Generally, the script is a sub flow, called on by a parent script to determine if we need to close for the day. The script first finds out what is the date today, then goes through the XML date list comparing each entry with todays date to make a holiday determination. If it gets through the entire date list without a match, the returned value is false. If it finds a match the returned value is true! Very simple, however the process uses about every programming trick in the book and for that reason it is fun to learn how the script works. It is highly efficient using less than 15 lines of code to do its magic!

We have also found the script to be useful for deriving other uses built on the same constructors. For example, finding out if we should be open or closed based on the time of day. The Time of Day Java bean in the UCCX library is great if you want to open and close once on a particular day. If you want to open at 7AM, close at 11 for lunch, then open again at 1PM and close at 5, it is a bit more difficult. Creating an XML document with the schedule for a particular CSQ, is a lot more useful! In fact we can economize on script reuse by pulling CSQ details from a QueueOptions.xml file and dramatically alter the details of a specific CSQ while reusing the same core script! XML is the way to fly, especially if you can use HTML and web technology to feed your script user specific call flow details like “call me back at this number” please.

Do to this kind of scripting you need to have a handle on string manipulation, XML, data type conversions and Xpath. For this reason the HolidayCheck script is a great learning tool. The video walks throughout the details of this script and provides, we hope, some useful instruction. We don’t know who wrote the original script, but it has been plagiarized by us all and it is remarkable when it is studied by those who want to learn its secrets!

Members can download the script from the DrVoIP.com site!

Top 5 Trends Transforming your Contact Center!

Posted on April 9, 2014 by DrVoIP

The Contact Center is being transformed at a rate of change that is beyond the ability of current management strategies to identify and react. Most contact centers are still using 1990 thinking in a 2020 world! The adoption rate of Smartphones, customer satisfaction scores through social media, wide availability of video options, and the mobility of customer demographics are terrorizing your call center and what are you doing about it? Still routing phone calls based on Area Code? Queueing Callers on more incoming telephone lines, while employing less customer service representatives? Unless you are Google or the IRS, neither of which cares about customer service, you are about to become extinct! Here are the top five Contact Center Killers of traditional business models!

(1) Scheduled Call Back – The traditional strategy for customer retention has been to increase the size of the “catchers mitt” by adding more incoming telephone lines. Nobody ever says lets increase the number of agents answering incoming calls, but they are always quick to add more incoming telephone lines! All this does is increase customer frustration, pressure agents to short change the current customer interaction and drive abandoned calls through the statistical roof! Do not even consider this option until you have explored all the other options listed below!

(2) Mobile Phones – Without exception, unless your client demographic is that of the Jitterbug generation, your clients are mobile phone users! This means they have advanced smartphone functionality, SMS or Text capability and they are web savvy! Tap the functionality of these devices to increase customer satisfaction while reducing over all costs. Text messages can be used to initiate the Call Back function in your contact center! Smart Aps can be created to help clients “self navigate” through your call tree, with the the push of a single button! Get Smart Phone integration into your contact center yesterday!

(3) Video Support – High “touch” now means Video! The traditional talk path is narrow, strangles information and is inappropriate for todays high speed, information rich customer contact strategies. Video offers a deeper and richer personal experience. When it comes to “show me”, “teach me” and “help me” scenarios, one call completion statistics escalate when video is part of the contact center arsenal of customer satisfaction tools. Get your Frequently Asked Questions into video format, or risk being ignored by a generation that might be able to read, but find YouTube a faster route to problem resolution.

(4) Social Media – Twitter can do more to damage your reputation than a bad restaurant review on Yelp! What social media monitoring tools are in your contact center arsenal? What website integration options have you implemented? Can your Customer Service Representatives open a real time video conversation with someone who has hit your website, or just told all their FB friends what the current hold time is in your Contact Center?

(5) Home base agents – did you read (1) above? The availability of hight speed network connectivity, now makes it possible to tap a labor pool that has nothing to do with driving distance to the office! Quality, trained and experienced Customer Service representatives are out there, living where they want to live and are available to the Call Center that has put distributed workforce connectivity solutions in place. Down the hall, or across the country, you can provide the exact same supervision, monitoring, and training for a remote customer service representative that you provide for that boiler room Contact Center that you heat, air condition, power and remains your biggest disaster recovery and business continuity challenge!

At DrVoIP we create software integrations that enable solutions for these Contact Center terrorists. No need to throw out your current ShoreTel ECC or CISCO UCCX, we can wrap these solutions around your existing facilities with rapid deployment prototype options that have high impact and low exploration costs. Click or Call!

Sending Text Messages to your Shoretel ECC or CISCO UCCX Contact Center?

Posted on March 13, 2014 by DrVoIP

We recently had an opportunity to create an emergency notification text messaging system for a financial service application built on ShoreTel iPBX and ECC technology. The requirement was to push out text based alerts to individual or groups of ShoreTel phones based on external events. These were typically stock tick updates and very time sensitive! The requirements document also required the ability to send text messages on manually on demand. The text messages would either be created by the Receptionist entering the text into a webpage for transmittal to the select phones or group of phones; or based on the receipt of a SMS text message. The SMS message would be relayed to the ShoreTel Phone API and then passed off to a group of phones for follow up by brokers as required to satisfy the client requests.

We have long contended that SMS application will find their way into the Call Center as triggers to initiate a scheduled call back as alternative to “please hold for the next available agent”. The opportunity to implement such an application was for us very exciting. Smartphones, undeniably ubiquitous, offer the possibility that customer service applications can be developed to enable customers to contact an inside “agent” without having to navigate a call tree! Why increase the number of telephone lines coming into your call center, just to put callers on hold until the next available agent can accept the call? People on hold, are people frustrated. If clients could just send a text message to the call center, targeted at the specific agent group responsible for problem or opportunity resolution, assured by return text message that they will be called at place and time certain, over all costs for all would be reduced and customer satisfaction increased. The concept of “abandoned” calls would be eliminated and real time reports, dramatically redefined!

We invision a Call Center in which there are actually very few incoming lines. The entire call center is based on Agents calling clients back based on agreed to call times defined in an incoming SMS Text message sent from a smart phone or smart phone application. The application, though functionally generic, could be made specific to a company product or service and also include the CRM links necessary for an Agent to service an account when they call the client back at the appointed time. This is a much more stream lined approach to Call Center operations in which telephone lines are optimized, Client service is customized and Agent time maximized.

There are any number of SMS gateways that can be integrated as an internal server or as a subscribed service and combined with the display functions of a ShoreTel phone to enable this scenario. Additionally, Waze can send real time location updates that can also be routed to ShoreTel phone displays. Imagine the application of location based services to SMS text messages out to the display of ShoreTel phones in a call center environment! ShoreTel does an excellent job of documenting the SDK and API interfaces necessary to support this application. In fact the standard API itself is more than useful and is demonstrated in the accompanying video.

Slamming it with ShoreTel Call Manager desktop deployment option!

Posted on March 7, 2014 by DrVoIP

One of the challenges in any ShoreTel deployment is the desktop Call Manager client installation. You can breeze through the complexity of a ShoreTel multi-server, multi-site deployment only to be foiled when the desktop clients need to be installed or updated. Nobody wants the thankless task! As most users do not have Local Administration rights to install software on their desktop machines, the system administrator gets a new task. So it is either “sneaker net” or an Active Directory Group Policy push out. Meanwhile, the ShoreTel deployment is otherwise complete! Frustration as the entire deployment is good to go, but the desktop clients have yet to be installed or updated! When does the admin team get here?

Now there is a tool out there that makes sense and can be a great help to the field implementation team, charged with getting the ShoreTel system installed, on time and on budget! Enter the rock stars at AdminArsenal with a very kool software solution named PDQ deploy and put an end to this client install fiasco! The product makes it easy to do a network based push out of the ShoreTel client, by the ShoreTel installation team as long as they have an Admin account and meet these two conditions: The target computers must be on the same network. This is not an over the Internet install. The application or patch must support a silent install. Most do, however there are some who do not. The admin must determine what the silent parameter is (/s, /quiet, etc.) to do the push. (Here are package details).

Think if this as a great tool for a deployment in which the ShoreTel implementation team needs to do all the onsite work when they might not have access to the client desktop help desk. PDQ will let you install MSI files to multiple computers! If your are a ShoreTel VoIP engineer, you need to add this solution to your tool kit! Check out a free trial!

Keep those comments comming!

UCCX Cheat Sheet – Agent Log-in in using Extension Mobility!

Posted on March 5, 2014 by DrVoIP

There is a two step process for logging into the systems if you are a mobile worker. The first step is to log into a Telephone and make the phone your Extension number. The Second Step is to log into the CISCO Agent Desktop (i.e. CAD) and make yourself ³Ready² to receive calls from the Contact Center.

Step One: – GoTo the phone you are logging into and press the button labeled ³services². This will bring up a list of Services that your phone supports. You should one or more services. Select the Service entitled ³Extension Mobility² by highlighting it with up/down scroll button on phone or entering the menu number.

Step Two: You will be prompted to enter your User Name and PIN. The User Name is your Active Directory (i.e. AD) login name, usually in the form of First Letter of your First Name followed by your Last Name. For Example, pbuswell. You will have to use the Touch Tone Pad on the phone to enter your name, and it is a bit cumbersome, but you will figure it out. The PIN number, unless you have changed it, will be the default of 12345678

The Phone should wink and blink¹ and reset itself. When it comes back alive, you should see your Extension number in the Display of the Phone. This means you have successfully logged into the phone on this desk! Please remember to reverse the process and LOG OUT when you are done.

Step Three: Log into the CAD, by bringing that software up on your associated computer. This will be a Short Cut on your desktop, or you will find it with your mouse under the Start, All Programs, CISCO, Desktop, Agent. You will then be presented with a screen that prompts for your User Name, Extension and Password. Enter your AD user name as used in the above step. The Extension is to match the Extension on your phone, and the Password is your AD password.

This should log you into the Contact Center and bring up your Agent Tool bar similar to the one below, though your buttons may be smaller. To indicate that you are READY to receive calls, you will need to push the READY icon (mouse over ICON) to see what they do! When you do not want to receive calls, you will push the NOT READY icon. At the top of the tool bar you will note your current Status!

Repurpose your CISCO 7900 phones as ShoreTel sip Extensions!

Posted on February 22, 2014 by DrVoIP

The CISCO 7900 series of phones have been a very popular handset in the “hosted” PBX space. CISCO discourages the use of these phones on other than CISCO systems, but there are so many of them out there, that they end up being used on a range of other systems from 3CX, ShoreTel to Asterisk and FreePBX. A company moving from a “hosted” solution or converting from a CISCO Call Manager to a ShoreTel system, for example, would normally wanted to protect their investment in handsets and repurpose them for use on ShoreTel. The CISCO 7900 family of phones has been shipping since at least 2002 and estimates have been that over 1 million handsets ship to market every day! By any measure, the market is littered with these phones. We would caution you however, before you hit Ebay, to understand that what you save in the purchase of handset hardware, you may end up spending in professional services and cumulated aggravation! If you are still committed to burning up IT staff or professional service hours, there are a few key issues you will need to understand.

First, CISCO Call Manager solutions have historically used a proprietary protocol named “skinny” of SCCP. Most hosted solutions have used the industry standard SIP protocol and because of its wide adoption by vendors in general, most new systems can support SIP end points. CISCO 79X0, 79X1 and 79X2 handsets most have their firmware converted from SCCP to SIP before they can be used on any SIP based system or on ShoreTel. The process of converting the firmware is not all that difficult but does require some basic resources like a CISCO login account and a TFTP server, though we have found the needed firmware all over the Internet. Setting up a TFTP server can be implemented in a number of ways from open source solutions like PumKin or Tftpd64. We prefer Tftpd64 for field deployments as it can also provide DHCP services that include the ability to specify required scope Options 150 and 66!

You can try flashing the phone without defaulting the configuration by just unlocking it and setting the Alt TFTP server to the correct IP address. You unlock your CISCO phone by hitting the Menu key, scroll to the network settings, hit unlock (**#**) for Alternative TFTP server, set it to yes and then in the next field enter in the IP address of the TFTP server. Experience has proved, however, that you should reset the phone. There are subtle differences between how the reset and unlock method is executed based on your exact model. Generally, you reset the phone by holding the # key while powering the phone and when it starts flashing orange and red, enter 123456789*0# on the keyboard, then be patient. Make sure your TFTP and DHCP servers are setup and working. DHCP Option 150 and Option 66 must point the phone to the TFTP server and directory containing the firmware files.

Again you will find that you really need to tweak the SiP software version as one may run and another version may not!

You should be aware that v4.4 code uses the following tftp files (which areall case sensitive):
 OS79XX.TXT  (This file must be on the TFTP as it defines the software load WITHOUT .bin extension).
 SIPDefault  (This file denotes parameters for all phones)
 POS3-04-4-00.bin
 SIP<your mac address>  (eg, SIP00036BABD123 parameters for a specific phone)
 RINGLIST.DAT         (optional) 
 dialplan.xml		(optional)
 ringer1.pcm		(optional)

Early versions of the SIP code did not require all of these, however if they are in the tftp directory, it doesn't hurt the loading process.  Later you will still need the TFP server to obtain configuration file when you boot your CISCO phones. Power on your CISCO  and the phone should display "upgrading" and you should see file transfers in your TFTP server log.       Be careful as the phone will from time to time looks like it is dead, but it is still loading files.  It takes time and patience  will ultimately yield a phone now flashed for SIP!

That was the easy part, now you have to understand the configuration files, how to edit them and the boot process. When the phone boots, it makes a DHCP request for usual IP configuration parameters including the necessary vendor specific options. ShoreTel uses Option 156 to specify the FTP server where its phones can download firmware and configuration files. CISCO uses TFTP and specifies that IP address in CISCO Option 150 and Industry Option 66. When the phone boots it will first look for a “install trust list” or certificate file which it will not find in your TFTP directory, so expect that file failure. It will then look for a SIPDefault.cnf which has information for all phones, and then a file that contains configuration data for a specific phone which is named SIP<macaddresss>.cnf.

Edit the SIPDefault.CNF in Notepad file and change the first three values: The first line of the file,image_version, sets what firmware version we are going to use. This needs to match either the firmware version already loaded on the phone or the firmware version that you have available in the tftp folder for the phone to upgrade to. The second setting, messages_uri sets the extension number that the phone will dial to access the voicemail system. The third setting, proxy1_address, sets the IP address for the phone system so the phone knows where to send it’s registration information. In the case of ShoreTel make sure you point this at the ShoreTel SipProxy IP NOT the ShoreTel HQ server!

For real detail on the content of the config file click this link. Each phone requires its own configuration file based on the MAC address of the phone. If our MAC address is 00175989A49E, then our configuration file will be named SIP00175989A49E.cnf. This file contains a list of XML tags. You will need to modify several tag entries. You can use notepad, but if you can make use of an XML editor like Komodo or Eclipse it will help you eliminate poorly formed XML tags. Scroll through the file and edit the following tags:

<processNodeName>172.16.1.100</processNodeName> should be set to the IP address of your ShoreTel SIP Proxy, NOTE the ShoreTel HQ server!

For Each extension line you want to register you will need to set the following parameter:

<authName>1234</authName> to your ShoreTel SIP UserName
<authPassword>1234456</authPassword> ShoreTel SIP Password

The lines also have other configuration data for displaying the Name and Extension number and you should find those XML tags easy to locate. The above tags however are the 3 minimum tags required to get your phone to register with ShoreTel. It should be understood that getting your phone to register, make and receive calls is not the same as integrating your CISCO phone with ShoreTel. Getting feature buttons to work and interfacing with the telephone book is an entirely new opportunity for head banging. Some of it can be accomplished by editing XML configuration files, but well outside the scope of this nugget ! The most likely success stories for CISCO on ShoreTel are the 7940/7960 phones. Be aware that there are subtle difference between the rest of the family like the 7941G/7960G and so forth. The 7942 and 7945 take extra tweaking and you many need to SSH into the phone to debug. It takes time, patience and perseverance to tinker with the various phone loads and XML options, but it can be done! As we get more examples, we will upload sample configurations to the Member portal.

Deploying VoIP in the Cloud or rolling your own “hosted PBX” – Part 1 Server Deployement

Posted on February 13, 2014 by DrVoIP

The entire subject of Virtualization and all things “cloud” has become something that even none technical people talk about. You might say it has gone “viral” and captured the interest of geeks, business people, professional technology managers and entrepreneurs. Personally, I never did get the whole fascination with hardware. In my mind hardware was just something we had to put up with to get to play with the software. When you stop and think about it, aside from the IT folks, nobody wants a Windows 2012 Server! What they want is a Website, a CRM package, a blog or a phone system. Having to deal with hardware was always a chore and it always seemed to me that whatever we had was obsolete within a year or so. The software could be upgraded, but the hardware had to be “refreshed” an expression that generally means, purchase new stuff!

Virtualization made hardware a bit more interesting. Now we could at least run a half dozen servers on one huge hardware platform. Back up and Restore became almost fun! Now you start adding virtualized appliances like phone systems, gateways and firewalls to the mix and software professionals get almost giddy! I think VMware has caused more new business creations than any other single “stimulus” package. Now, even a guy working out of his garage could compete with the big guys! Capital requirements were significantly reduced and new cloud based business could launch at the drop of a hat and the signing of a sales agreement! Internet bandwidth, access, creativity and an Amazon account and you were in the revenue production business!

Unless you are in the business of refreshing hardware, why would you want to bother with any of that hardware stuff? How long does it take your IT team to spin up a new server? Even if you are a one man show and you can control everything without benefit of a working committee, it takes time to setup a server! Some organizations take weeks to provision a new server! Now if you happen to have an Amazon account, even your plain vanilla book buying Amazon account, you could spin up a new Linux or Microsoft Server in about 15 minutes! With your “Amazon machine instance” you get a security group (read firewall) for your public IP address, a DNS name and a local network all in less time than it takes to unbox and rack a new hardware based solution.The Amazon portal lets you change the configuration of your instance on the fly. This means you can increase disk size, RAM, change bandwidth and update your firewall without a screw driver! Think about it, fully operational on net with pubic IP access in less than 15 minutes.

Now that 3CX, ShoreTel, Mitel and so many others offer Gateways that are “virtual” machines, you could actually spin up a “hosted PBX” in just a few hours! We though we would try it just for kicks! Log into AWS spin up a new Windows Sever and deploy ShoreTel or 3CX completely virtualized, including SIP trunks, Border Controllers and Remote phones both Hard and Soft. Should be hilarious! (Thanks to winter storms back east, we just brought up a 169 users system, across three states and had the client fully operational in 12 hours from the emergency phone call to the DrVoIP hot line). This first video clip just deals with provisioning the server. In subsequent versions we will bring up an entire phone system and you can watch over our shoulders!

How to install the ShoreTel Virtual Switches!

Posted on February 10, 2014 by DrVoIP

Virtualization has significantly altered the options available for your choice of deployment models. With the introduction of ShoreTel 14.2 you can completely virtualize your VoIP deployment right down to the Gateways! If you have no Analog telephone device requirements or telephone company lines, you can now eliminate those ShoreTel Orange boxes! This is a significant advancement in the state of the art and one that will become increasingly more prevalent as we look for viable business continuity strategies. The ShoreTel virtual switches come in a number of flavors: Service appliance, phone switch and trunk switch. The Virtual appliance is similar to the ShoreTel SA100/400 server and is essentially a free feature enhancement! The ShoreTel Virtual Phone switch can also be used as the “spare” switch available for use by phones that need to register with a new switch when the ShoreGear switch they were using fails. Again, no cost associated with this unless you leave them on that virtual switch for longer than the normal 45 day grace period.

The VoIP technology in general has become more complex demanding new skill sets from those who install them. In addition to the telephony, network, firewall, SIP and Microsoft software applications that historically touch your ShoreTel deployment, you will now need to understand VMware ESXi deployments including the use of OVA files. The ShoreTel Virtual switches are now distributed as a part of your HQ and DVM server images. They live in the FTP server and can be retrieved in one of two ways. You can either download the image file when you configure your appliance in the Shoreware Director portal, or you can load it as a URL in the VMware machine configuration as the target for your OVA file.

If you are familiar with VMware, the installation process is relatively simple, straight forward and easy to understand. Once the machine is specified the Vmware configuration is as simple as adding the basic network IP components including the address of the Shoreware HQ server. The machine will ultimately configure, load and become available as a virtual machine on your ESXi platform. From that point on, there is little difference to the installation of a virtual appliance or a real ShoreGear switch in Shoreware Director. The basic difference has to do with the selection of the hardware platform type. Normally you would select an SA100 or a ShoreGear 50, for example. In the case of a virtual appliance, you will select a new category from the drop hardware list, that indicates what type of appliance you are installing. The rest of the configuration is the same. The virtual appliances behave like the normal orange” boxes, even requiring a firmware upgrade. They appear in both the Diagnostic Monitoring and Quick View and in all respects operate like their real world hardware brethren.

We should all understand that those little orange boxes contain application specific microprocessors or digital signal processors (DSP’s). The real heavy lifting normally done by those chips for CODEC work, for example, will now be done in software. Additionally, don’t make the mistake of deploying virtual appliances at sites logically, without understanding that the VMware hardware platform location is just as important on over all performance as ever! All and all this is a major step forward for ShoreTel and you can expect these virtual appliances to become a standard part of your deployments over time. The video clip reviews the actual installation of both a phone switch and a service appliance!

Note – The ShoreTel news here is that the actual Voice Gateways are virtualized, not just the application, but the Gateways!

ShoreTel V14 Real-time Diagnostic and Monitoring Dashboard

Posted on January 14, 2014 by DrVoIP

I am found of repeating that “product development is a process not an event”! Though the marketing folks need to package, position and promote products based on feature sets, generally products emerge over time. Building on previous releases, customer feed back and recommendations, products continue to emerge with new functionality. Most product development focuses on features that have market demand or differentiate one product from another. Occasionally, a new product feature is targeted at someone other than an end user. Engineers and Technicians are typically the last group of people to get a feature developed that makes their lives a bit more easy. Such is the case for ShoreTel Version 14 and the introduction of a “Diagnostic and Monitoring” tool!

The latest Version of ShoreTel has added a capability that we think is essential in iPBX technology as SIP becomes more of a standard. If you have ever attempted to trouble shoot SIP without the ability to do packet capture, you will know how valuable this feature set is. CISCO long ago had RMTM tools as a standard part of a Call Manager deployment. ShoreTel has now added that functionality to its standard product offering and it is dramatic! Now part of the ShoreWareDirector user interface, the Diagnostic Monitoring tool is a complete glass cockpit with a variety of monitoring tools. These tools include real time status updates of system areas including connections, trunk groups, bandwidth utilization, voice quality, switch status and service conditions. Combining “Quick View”, with other tools that previously required loading modules or a putty session, the Diagnostic Monitoring center is a self navigation center for trouble shooting.

We are particularly excited about the “remote packet capture” feature of the Diagnostic tools. This tool enables you to remotely capture packets and bring them to a local pcap file. You are offered the opportunity to capture everything or limit your capture to specific areas of interest. For example, if you want to capture only SIP packets related to the ShoreGear switch you are running your SIP Proxies on, the diagnostic tool set lets you select these options. The files are WireShark compatible and if you have that application on your server, a simple click will launch the application and bring up your capture for analysis. This is a very power capability and simplifies some of the issues associated with setting up WireShark for remote capture. We think this feature set was long over due, but we are just mere engineers, what do we know!

ShoreTel Version 14.2 is “Virtually there”!

Posted on January 9, 2014 by DrVoIP

We have previously argued that ShoreTel should shed the hardware business and focus on software development only. Just our opinion and personal hangup! We believe that unless you have the Market Capitalization of an Apple, it is hard to walk both sides of the street and do both Hardware and Software! Even Microsoft, does only Software! Well ShoreTel may in fact be moving to Software only through the introduction of a family of “virtual” machine offerings. Though versions prior to Version 14.1 offered some level of Server virtualization, ShoreTel deployments would still require lots of those “Orange” ShoreGear switches.

On January 28th ShoreTel will begin to ship the first release of Version 14.2 and all components of the ShoreTel architecture will be virtualized! This means that you don’t need those “Orange” boxes unless you are connecting to analog or digital trunk lines! ShoreTel Switches including Conferencing servers will be available as OVA files for VMware deployments. ShoreTel will begin to offer a virtual phone switch, a virtual service appliance and a new family of virtual SIP Switches with complete PRI parity. The ShoreTel compatible Ingate SIParator will also be available as a Virtual Session Border Controller. Licensing can be significantly reduced to a phone or trunk license, now how kool is that?

The ShoreTel virtual phone switch will support between 250 and 1000 phones based on calculated VM resources. The virtual phone switch will will support all ShoreTel features including backup automated attendant, make-me-conferences, hunt groups, bridged call appearances and extension monitoring. Pricing is estimated at 8-15% below the cost of another “Orange” box and you can mix and match virtual and real boxes! The virtual SIP trunk switch is estimated to be some 50% below “Orange” box costs! The virtual service appliance will offer IM and Web conferencing from 50-200 simultaneous sessions. Instant Messaging is now without charge from ShoreTel when implemented on a virtual server, just your usual VMware hardware costs!

We consider this the strongest move that ShoreTel has made in its product line, since it moved from analog phones to SIP handsets! Though ShoreTel is following the examples of others like CISCO Version10, we see this a the right next step in the process for ShoreTel product development. With the enterprise world solidly focused on virtualization and the rapid but steady migration from TDM to SIP, a Virtualized ShoreTel is an essential element of a successful business continuity and disaster recovery program. ShoreTel is starting to look an awful lot like a pure software company and we think that is not only “brilliantly simple”, but very smart.

– DrVoIP