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.

ShoreTel Enhanced Workgroup Services!

Posted on by DrVoIP

Historically, there were three services in the ShoreTel architecture that were no distributed to other servers.   To oversimplify, this meant that if the HQ server (read primary server) was unavailable, the services that were not distributed would not function.  The three services were Route Points, Account Codes, and Workgroups.   For example, if a user group was set to “forced” account code verification and the server was unavailable, that service would fail and the affected user would not be able to place a call.   Likewise, if the HQ server were unavailable, Workgroup services would fail.  ( The “best practice’ deployment strategy was to backup a Workgroup with a “hunt group” given that the HG ran on a switch and not a server, it would continue to function in this scenario.  Calls targeting agents in a Workgroup would fail over to a hunt group that would target the same list of agents).

ShoreTel has steadily progressed the distribution of these services out from the HQ server to either SG switches or  Distributed servers.  With the latest release of ShoreTel,  they have migrated critical services to include Workgroup services.   This is a major enhancement and any organization that makes use of the Workgroup functionality, especially in a multi-site environment,  will realize a  benefit by these enhancements.

Through the ShoreTel administration portal, we now find a drop down window that enables us to select which server should be utilized to run the Workgroup we are defining.   For example, in a multi-site environment, I might want to have the Workgroups organized by Site and run the workgroup service on the DVM at that site.   This would keep the Workgroup local and a failure of the HQ server would not dramatically affect the workgroup at the remote site.   We note that, in the absence of the HQ server, we are still unable to make database changes.  For example, Logging In/Out of a Workgroup would not be possible, but the remote Workgroup would still function.

Additionally, we note that you can continue to name a Hunt Group as a backup extension.   The key difference here is that the Hunt Group can contain extensions that are Workgroups on other servers!   This offers a degree of flexibility not previously available and is a viable alternative to a straight Hunt Group solution.   A failure of the HQ server will only effect the Workgroups that are on that server and distributed Workgroups on other servers will continue to run.  A failure of a DVM with an operating Workgroup can fail to a Hunt Group that can be used to route calls to other Workgroups.

The vocabulary might be a bit confusing, but the strategy represents a significant step forward in assuring the operation of a distributed call processing application as powerful as ShoreTel Workgroups!

WorkgroupScreen

ShoreTel CDR Format- How to find the International Calls!

Posted on by DrVoIP

Recently, while working with a third party Call Accounting vendor, we had an opportunity to revisit ShoreTel CDR records.  ShoreTel stores CDR records in two locations for two different purposes.  Historically, the first format is basically the “Legacy CDR Text Files” and they are stored in the Shoreline Data folder as log files.  The log files are written to \Shoreline Data\Call Records 2 and are written out at Midnight to a file named CDR-YYMMDD.HHMMSS.log.   This is the file that is generally accessed by third party Call Accounting software vendors.

The second format is written to a MySQL database which is used to generate call accounting reports directly from the ShoreTel server.  In version 7 ShoreTel began to migrate away from Microsoft Access to MySQL for both the CDR and the configuration database.   There is a procedure for converting the older files into the new MySQL format, but we are not going to cover that as most people have already made this transition.      The MySQL database also opens the opportunity to create custom reports using SQL queries.  Through the ShorewareDirector portal, under Reporting options, you can set the Retention Period for CDR Data as well as the Archive retention period.

CDR Options in ShorewareDirector Portal

If your third party Call Accounting software uses the 011 to detect an international CDR record, you will need to make some adjustments.  ShoreTel uses a Canonical format to collect digits.  This means that no matter what the user actually dials on the phones keypad, the system internally converts the numbers to +country-code area-code subscriber –number.   The fact that you dialed 9+011+52+3654587 will be stored in the ShoreTel CDR log file as 9+523654587 and the 011 reference will not be in the record.  The following silent film clip walks you through the format and content of the CDR.log files.

Configure ShoreTel for Redundancy, Resiliency or Business Continuity?

Posted on by DrVoIP

Of late we have seen a growing interest in building “disaster recovery” solutions for both the data and the voice applications so critical for business operation.  First, we need to make sure we understand the difference between redundancy, resiliency and other configuration options to assure business continuity.  Many more installations now include the use of a remote “collocation” facility as an key  component of the installation plan.  What is the best way to configure a ShoreTel HQ server, for example to provide for continued operation under a wide variety of options.

The subject of redundancy is almost amusing at times.  How much redundancy is reasonable and appropriate?  You can have all the redundancy your budget can fund, but at the end of the day are you able to continue the business operation in the event of a catastrophic event.    Clearly, two power supplies are better than one.  If they are both plugged into the same commercial power outlet, however, it really will not matter how many power supplies you have if you lose commercial power!  Again, we need to focus on what are we trying to protect?

Redundant servers?   Some HQ servers have been configured with “double take” enabling a hot standby server to take over in the event of a primary server failure.    Candidly, we do not see the benefit of hot standby server swaps in the ShoreTel architecture and it is a nightmare to administer, backup and restore.  The cost of the solution outweighs the benefits and there are other configurations that are more cost effective and work just as well.

For example, there is no law that says you can not install a ShoreTel Distributed Voice Mail server at the same level as the ShoreTel HQ server.   Actually, this works just fine!   Install the servers at the same physical location, or put the HQ server in the remote “collocation” facility.  If they are installed at the same “logical” level (i.e. appear on the same level in the Shoreware Director, either server can handle the load.   Generally, you would put all of the users and switches for that site under the DVM and use the HQ as your “fail up” and proxy solution.   Nothing wrong with this configuration, it is cost-effective and easy to administer.  From time to time you might hear ShoreTel say “ please wait while I connect you to the correct server” but even that can be managed.

ShoreTel HQ has three services that are not distributed: Route Points; Account Codes and Workgroups.  If you lose the HQ server, you will lose these services, but generally, that is a small price to pay for this level of resiliency!   ShoreTel Version 10 promises to distribute these services, so there is no reason not to configure this way and achieve full survivability given the building is still standing.

You don’t have to think very long about a Katrina or Haiti, especially if you live in California!  It is only prudent to not only plan for some level of “redundancy”, but also to plan for how the business would operation if we could not get into our building!  If we put the HQ server at the “collocation” facility and we provide for Trunk Lines and “dial tone”, we can balance this possibility.   The issue is, that if the building housing the people becomes unavailable, users can still log in and route their phones to cell phones or make use of RDP to access their Call Managers.

The “collocation” option often requires a trade-off between bandwidth and trunk lines.   You can put all your trunk lines at the colo, in which case every call made from the sites, will traverse a WAN.  So moving the trunk lines to the colo increases resiliency but also drives up your WAN cost.  At the end of the day, it is most likely some combination of bandwidth and trunk lines spread between the facilities.  In either case, you will work with your carrier to enable lines to be repointed in the event of an outage.  This is a bit more challenging if you are in New York and your collocation facility is in Phoenix, but it can be done.

We are experimenting with the use of SIP trunk facilities at the Collocation site.  Generally, this can be more cost effective especially if you can get an agreement for a burstable SIP pipe.  You may not want to pay for T1’s at the collocation if you are only planning to use them for a disaster situation!  SIP also enables you to be generally independent of your physical location.

It is a sign of the times that we spend so much time planning for “what if” scenarios, but being prepared is not only prudent but appropriate.   Have a comment on this blog?  Email:drvoip@drvoip.com

DisasterRecovery

Why move the Auto Attendant into the Contact Center?

Posted on by DrVoIP

Many Call Center applications have an Automated Attendant front end call tree.  Typically, you  might have an Automated Attendant that plays the familiar On-Hours recoding: “Thank you for calling our company, press 1 for technical support and 2 for sales support”.  The question asked in today’s blog is: should the Automated Attendant be located in the PBX or in the Call Center? There are very interesting ramifications for each of these options.

Generally, with out thinking this question through, the easy answer is to have the PBX do the front end Automated Attendant.  In the ShoreTel world, the On-Hours/Off-Hours scheduling of the changes to the call tree and messages played is so “brilliantly simple” that everyone will select this implementation strategy.   In our simple example above, selecting either option will direct the caller via a route-point/IRN marriage into the Contact Center to be processed by the appropriate Service, Group and Agent.

If you implement that Automated Attendant in the PBX, however simple it is, you potentially rob management of very urgent call detail information. Typically, the Off-Hours location is a general delivery mailbox in the PBX anyway, so why not just keep it all in the PBX?   If the Automated Attendant shuttles calls to the Off-Hour location, that call may never become known to the Contact Center and therefore would  not be captured in the Contact Center Historical Reports.   Call Center Management might be very interested in knowing how many calls came into the Center before or after On-Hours!  To obtain the information the Call Center, not the PBX needs to host the Automated Attendant!

What is the result of implementing the Automated Attendant in the Call Center?  If you look at the above Automated Attendant script, you can see immediately that we need to add the famous “If you know the extension number of the person you want to speak with, dial it at any time during this recording”.   Given that you have already concluded that this is an option you want to offer clients, something a Call Center manager might not recommend, how do you implement this feature using the ShoreTel Contact Center?

There are several ways to do this on the ShoreTel ECC, but all options require the creation of a “Call Profile” value.   We have put together a quick video tutorial on how to implement a multi-digit transfer in the ShoreTel Contact Center using the Graphical Scripting Tools.   Minimally, after you create the Call Profile value you will need to have a “Get Digits” and the “Transfer” Icon.    In our example, we have created a Call Profile value named “ExtensionNumber”.  This value anticipates a three digit integer and does not require a termination character.   The GetDigits Icon is normally associated with a WAV file that prompts the caller for digits.  Once the digits are collected the are deposited into the Call Profile place holder named “ExtensionNumber”.   This value is then past to the Transfer Icon and the value is dialed by this function.   Enjoy!

Mobile Call Manager for the iPhone?

Posted on by DrVoIP

One of the benefits of a successful blog, is the talented people you meet and the ideas that you exchange with other industry professionals. Through an earlier blog on the subject of connecting an Apple Iphone to a ShoreTel System as a SiP extension, I met such a creative talent: Matt Vlasach of Pacificswell! Matt was both an excited ShoreTel user and a Iphone aficionado. Thought Matt was happy to play with SIP his real interest was in creating a ShoreTel App for the Iphone!

As a result of Matts talented development team at Pacificswell, I have had the pleasure of playing with a beta version of StreamLine, a mobile call manager for the Iphone! If you have always wished that ShoreTel could work on your Iphone, your wish has been granted! Pacificswell’s first release of the App is a useful, easy to master, technically brilliant mobile call manager! Using Streamline you can remotely connect to your ShoreTel server and setup your call handling modes and activate your Office Anywhere feature. The App is intuitive and graphically obvious!

Even using the Apple developers platform to obtain the beta version ( an Apple strategy for enabling developers to offer the App before it appears in the App store), the download and install was remarkably simple. It downloads and installs using the already familiar App Store process! Configuration was a breeze and I had the App up and running in under five minutes.

Clearly there are some server side issues that need to be addressed and license compliance issues for the ShoreTel Mobile Call Manager, but technically, the App is brillant. More importantly it just works! I was able to select either my Office desk phone or my Iphone as the primary answer point. Each of the Call Handling modes can be accessed in a visual graphic that is experentially compatible with the ShoreTel user interface for setting up Call Handling Options.

Product Development is a process, not an event! Matt assures me that he will continue the development and enhancement of this App adding more features in future releases. The product can be explored in detail on his site at Pacificswell and I have included some screen shots below!

Keep the cards and letter coming! The App will be available at the Apple App Store on January 4th!

Find Me Locations
Find Me Locations

Call Handling Modes
Call Handling Modes

Select your Desktop or Iphone as prmary answering point!
Select your Desktop or Iphone as prmary answering point!

ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center Call Routing based on Schedules!

Posted on by DrVoIP

If you have been following our tech tips, you know that route points in the ShoreTel IPBX have a matching IRN in the Contact Center. If you want to route a call to a different destination based on the date and time that a call hits the Contact Center, how and where would you apply the schedule? Technicians familiar with the ease of creating schedules in the ShoreTel IPBX, might immediately apply a schedule to a route point. After all, each call to the Contact Center hits a route point first, why not apply the OnHours/OffHours call handling directly to the route point?

At the end of the day, Contact Centers are designed to provide management, detailed information to facilitate staffing, allocate resources, decrease call holding time and increase customer satisfaction. Candidly, it is all about REPORTS! My personal prejudice is that contact centers should be designed by starting with Reports! What is it that Management wants to see? If we want to know how many callers are hitting the Contact Center during Off-Hours, for example, we can not apply the schedules to the Route Points. If the Schedule applied to the Route Point deflects the caller to a Voice Mail box, that call will not appear in the total Calls presented to the Contact Center.

If you want the call to be counted, it must actually enter the Contact Center! For this reason, most Contact Center deployments are deployed with the Automated Attendant functionality being defined within the Contact Center. In this way we can accumulate accounting information on all calls that hit the Contact Center, regardless of how they are ultimately routed. The ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center has a very powerful configuration capability as it relates to defining Schedules. Schedules are defined as “types of days” and “shifts”. At first this concept is a bit difficult to digest, but once you play with it you will realize just how powerful and impact this configuration strategy can have on your overall Contact Center call flow.

The Working Times facility enables you to define a type of day and then associate shifts to that day type. The normal ShoreTel Schedule works on a binary On-Hours Off-Hours call handling model. What happens if you want to build a call flow that needs to have calls routed differently between specific hours of the day. For example, between 12AM and 8PM, we want incoming calls to be routed to the Guard Station. Between 8AM and 12 Noon we want a live answer point at the Reception Desk. Between Noon and 1PM calls need to be routed to an outside answering service; and between 1PM and 5 PM they need to be routed back to the Reception desk. Now any technician that has been working with the ShoreTel IPBX for any period of time has developed several strategies for handling this often required call flow. The strategy usually involves cascading Hunt Groups in combination with Workgroups to achieved the desired result.

The Working Times facility within the Contact Center would handle this complexity with ease. You would define a Day Type (i.e. WeekDay) and the define the various Shifts that comprise that day. In the example above, the ticking of the clock would transition through the various “shifts” resulting in a different destination based on the time of day. This is advantageous in a call center environment and significantly less demanding to administer than the cascading Hunt group strategy. Contact Center call flow is often managed on a time of day, day of week and holiday basis at a level of sophistication that goes way beyond the On-Hours Off-Hours approach to call handling. The ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center Working Times facility is a power strategy for achieving maximum call routing control.

VoIP QOS Network Monitoring and Pathview Cloud!

Posted on by DrVoIP

Trouble Shooting VoIP issues in a multi-site deployment is a challenge to even the most talented network engineer. It is often difficult to determine what is a voice equipment issue and what is an issue aggravated by a network conditions. As network engineer troubleshooting an issue, having access to network monitoring tools is essential. Sometimes we have to use the basic ICMP tool sets and ping our way through a trace route, but network connectivity is only one element of QOS related areas in a VoIP deployment. (Actually, it would be great if clients invested in putting network monitoring tools in place, but they only seem to appreciate their networks when something goes wrong)!

What is that we need to monitor anyway? We split the monitoring world into two basic camps: Flow based accounting and Health checking software. Flow based monitoring enables us to check the source/destination IP address; source/destination port; IP protocol; TOS and Ingress interface. This is helpful when you are trying to figure out what applications are running on your network and who is streaming real time media. Clearly important stuff, but at the end of the day, when it comes to logging into someone’s network remotely and trying to figure out why some remote user has garbled phone calls, there is nothing like an in place Health check!

When we talk about the “health” of the network we are interested in knowing about Bandwidth capacity, Loss, Jitter, Mean Opinion Score (MOS), latency and tagging.These are the words that make a VoIP engineer smile!Would it not be wonderful to log into your clients network and have this kind of history available between key end points of a multi-site deployment?Rarely, do I ever publically endorse a product but the folks Apparent Networks have gone out of their way to make their product available, useable and free!You need to stop what you are doing and download Path View Cloud, a host based network monitoring solution from Apparent Networks.

Not only is this software as useful as a button hole, but you can download a fully functional 5 node solution for absolutely no money! In previous posts, I have discussed the fact that, despite best practice, clients continue to attempt VoIP phone deployment over DSL through VPN tunnels! Path View Cloud enables you to collect real-time network health information about key endpoints in your network. Typically, it is the remote user or the WAN points that you are going to want to study. Path View Cloud enables you to create monitoring solutions that regularly report on health checks and trigger alerts when “violations” have been detected. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus and you can see packets!


Path Preview status

Clearly Apparent Networks believes that offering 5 free nodes will get you to order more!The offer is, however, compelling and I can tell all you cheap, penny-pinching, tight wads that will not invest in network monitoring software, that you will sleep better at night with this Path View Cloud solution in place.Network and VoIP engineers and technicians, you need this arrow in your quiver to make troubleshooting more visual!

ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center “Change Call Profile” icon

Posted on by DrVoIP

How many people hit the Auto Attendant and then dialed one for Sales? One of the most requested reports from ShoreTel clients is the analysis of Automated Attendant key strokes. With in the ShoreTel iPBX there are probably several ways to implement this, but we prefer the use of “route points” (see past blog). “ Thank you for calling our company during our normal business hours. For Sales Press 1, for Service Press 2 or stay on the line and the next available member of our staff will be right with you”. Typical Automated Attendant? We set the time out value to go to a “hunt group” and each of the menu items to a route point. You can actually run a User Detail report against a route point, as long as that route point terminates on a Shoretel end point other than a TAPI end point. For this reason, you can then run the report and find out exactly how many callers dialed one for sales!

Recently, we had to create an Automated Attendant on an Enterprise Contact Center. At first this seemed almost boring, but then we ran into an issue. You can use the MENU icon to create your Automated Attendant script, with a TRANFER icon to each destination selected by the caller. You can use the SCRIP icon to send the caller on to a script to collect information like the callers account number for a SQL database look up; but how do you send a caller to “service”? Now that was a more interesting challenge and I have to thank Chad Burnett for pointing out the use of what has become my favorite new ShoreTel ECC scripting icon: “the Change Profile” action. This icon is a powerful call profile manipulator and enables the Enterprise Contact Center configuration to explode with call processing options.

Using the Change Call Profile icon you can select various Call Profiles for manipulation. Each system contains a number of mandatory system level call profiles like ANI and Caller ID. You as a system designer can also create Call Profiles to meet the needs of your exacting design requirements. For example, you might add the Call Profile “Account Code” that you might use in a script that prompts the caller to enter digits that you will use to look up a record in a SQL database.

The Change Call Profile icon also allows you to select a previously defined SERVICE. The following video clip reviews how the iPBX and the ShoreTel ECC interconnect. It demonstrates the use of the Change Call Profile icon, by demonstrating the creation of a simple automated attendant!

SIP firmware for ShoreTel handsets?

Posted on by DrVoIP

To the sales team, I sound like a broken record as I repeated the engineering driven mantra: “A VoIP solution is only as good as the network it is build on”.     No matter how many times we tell clients that you can not obtain reliable, predictable toll quality voice communications over the public Internet, they insist on having us implement it.   The old marketing adage “you do not give customers what they need, you give them what they want” clearly applies and despite our best arguments to do otherwise; we find ourselves implementing VoIP solutions using VPN over DSL or Cable.   The good news is that when it works,  it is  often useable for inter-office communications.   When it does not work, it sounds like the worst cell phone  call and would not be something that you would use to support business communications with a client.

In the VoIP world in general and the ShoreTel world in particular, there is a measurable performance difference between an MPLS deployment and a VPN tunnel through the public internet.    An appropriately designed MPLS circuit with carrier Service Level Agreements in place will out perform the best VPN tunnel through the public internet.   Yet clients continue to believe they can put a VoIP handset  at the bosses house and run it over a DSL based VPN back to the “puzzle palace” and that it will  perform as well as the phone on his office desk.   The reality of the deployment is that this implementation seldom meets customer expectations.

A ShoreTel deployment of a remote handset for a home based work force can be accomplished under two basic models.   In the more desirable, albeit more costly model,  we create a “site” which involves the placement of a ShoreTel media gateway (read SG switch) at the remote location.  VoIP handsets interact with the SG media gateway or call manager at the remote location for all call setup, addressing, signaling and control.    In the ShoreTel world the call setup between a VoIP handset and an SG media gateway will use the MGCP protocol.   This protocol is a client/server or master/slave model and when compared with other protocols can generally be summarized as complex and “chatty”.   ShoreTel implements SIP for SG-SG communication, but uses MGCP for SG witch to handset call control.  Once a phone call is setup up, only the RTP media stream needs to traverse the VPN tunnel, however.

The other less expensive model s the placement of a remote VoIP handset only.   In this model, the handset is part of the “headquarters” site.  Unfortunately this is the deployment model we see the most when clients attempt to interconnect a single home worker with the corporate network with out the benefit of a carrier SLA.     A DSL, hopefully with a static IP address, and a device that can support a “point-to-point” VPN tunnel are the “minimum daily adult” requirement for VoIP connectivity.   In this model, the VoIP handset is communicating MGCP over the VPN tunnel with a call manager at the headquarters location.  Every handset action, from off-hook to digit key depress, is communicated over the VPN tunnel back to a media gateway at the home office.  Very “chatty”.

As engineers we can talk ourselves into a coma when discussing QOS options, DSCP markings, router queuing strategies and bandwidth reservation parameters.   At the end of the day, however, the only QOS “opinion” that really matters is what the users thinks!   Mean Opinion Score or MOS is the measure of what users rate the quality of a phone call.   Here is what we have learned after supporting hundreds of remote users on none SLA based circuits, typically VPN over DSL and Cable.   Rule one:  use only symetrical circuits (same up and down load speeds).  Rule two: Hard phones beat soft phones; and Rule three:  SIP phones beat MGCP phones.  It is that simple.   If we put a SIP based phone at a remote location, they will out perform an MGCP based handsets on the same circuit as measured by user MOS!  The SIP phone will perform with a higher level of reliability, be more resilient to latency and jitter, and will experience significantly less call disconnects than an MGCP based VoIP handset.

If you study the hosted VoIP service provider market, you will find that the predominant VoIP handset deployment strategy is SIP based.   Why is that?  We could go completely geek on you and  illustrate the complexity of call setup comparing MGCP with SIP setup messages, but why bother.  MOS rocks.  In this environment SIP deployments will yield higher customer satisfaction scores than MGCP deployments.   We are sincerely hoping and praying that ShoreTel has a “SIP firmware load” on the product road map to support their family of outstanding desktop handsets as they do not have a SIP handset solution.    Currently, when we have to support remote workers who insist on running VPN tunnels over DSL and Cable, we deploy Polycom and Aastra handsets to achieve maximum customer satisfaction in the wild west of internet telephony and home based workers!

Fun with ShoreTel Voice Mail

Posted on by DrVoIP

Stuck on how to get a WAV file of a professionally recorded voice mail greeting into the right ShoreTel Voice Mail box? After all there is no import utility as there is during the creation of an Automated Attendant. I can’t speak for you, but I was curious to know if I could just copy the WAV file to the mailbox? Where was the mailbox anyway? Now that you mention it, where are the voice messages.

ShoreTel has always had a folder entitled “Shoreline data”, the name a residual of the company’s old name, look and feel. Historically, this folder contained all of the information you would need to have available to restore a crashed server from bare metal. The later releases of ShoreTel have moved configuration files to a MySQL database, but you still need to have this folder to do a system restore. The folder, among other items, contains the voice mail structure of your deployment and the actual voice mail files for each individual mailbox.

In the VMS folder, you will find two folders: “Message and ShoreTel”. The Message folder contains actual voice mail messages in ShoreTel WAV format; and the other folder contains a list of folders that match the number of each mailbox on the ShoreTel deployment. Each VM box folder contains a WAV file for the mailbox name and each greeting recorded in that users mailbox. The greetings have easy to recognize names like 115Greet01_01.wav which represents the Standard Call Handling mode Greeting. If you re-record your greeting you will create a new file named 115Greet01_X.wav, where X is the revision number of the recording.

There is a also a Mailbox.DAT file that contains system configuration information and the unique ID of every message received by that particular voice mail box. The actual voice message, however, is contained in a separate folder appropriately named messages! In this file you will find a unique message WAV file that is the actual voice mail recording. It will have the format 1K0VGJSGI.wav where 1K0VGJSGI being unique message identification. There will also me a matching 1K0VGJSGI.msg file that acts as an index pointed to by the unique message identification written to the DAT file in the individual voice mailbox folder.

ShoreTel has a number of debug and diagnostic tools that can be used to assist in administration and troubleshooting. The CFG.exe program is a useful tool for obtaining information about mailboxes, voice mail servers, phonebooks, automated attendant DNIS maps and other specific voice mail box configuration data. Using CFG you can turn on message waiting lamps, have the voice mail system dial specific extensions, list message details, purge and restore messages and generally manipulate the voice message structure. The three part video clip details all of this information for your education and enjoyment!