Run ShoreTel on Vmware Player or Oracle VirtualBox!

Posted on July 14, 2014 by DrVoIP

With the release of ShoreTel Version 4.2 the company introduced the concept of virtual appliances. These software objects, had the potential of replacing the Orange ShorGear hardward boxes that typically characterize a ShoreTel deployment. The wisdom of trading the power of dedicated hardware based digital signal processing chips for the variable power of a shared computing resource aside, there are any number of advantages to using “virtual machines”. Currently ShoreTel supports Vmware ESXi and Hyper-V, so we thought we would push the envelop and try alternatives, for example Oricales Virtualbox and Vmware’s Fusion and Vmware player and see what results we could achieve. Just for kicks we thought we would see if we could inport and OVA file into Amazon Web Services and run a ShoreTel switch instance in the cloud!

The ShoreTel OVA and ISO files are distributed with Version 14.2 and you can link to them in several ways. They are in the intetput, ftproot folder on the ShoreTel HQ server. You will find two folders TSU and TSV, each with an OVA file and an ISO image. The TSU folder contains the objects necessary to create the Conference Appliance and the TSV folder contains the Phone and Trunk Switch objects. Think of the OVA file as a configuration profile that draws the outline of your virtual machine and defines the basic hardware configuration. The ISO image, contains the operating system. In the case of the ShoreTel ISO, it is in fact a Windriver Linux distribution, which has its roots (excuse the Linux pun) in the https://www.yoctoproject.org.

Clearly, ShoreTel is cutting the cost of goods, by reducing the need to produce Voice Gateways. It does not look to us however, that they are passing any of that reduction off to end users however. The cost of implementing a virtual ShoreTel Gateway is not much different than the cost of actually buying the hardware solution. The motivation for using the Virtual machines must be based on something other than acquisition cost. For we engineers however, it is fun to play with. You can spin up a machine in short order and use if for 45 days before you have to pay for the licenses. In the case of the conference appliance, there does not appear to be any cost other than the hardware used to run your Virtual Machine.

There appears to be three options for virtualization: the conference server; a phone switch and a trunk switch. The conference server lets you create an environment for web based conferencing and desktop sharing. The phone switch is a direct replacement for the ShoreGear family of users switches. Likewise the Trunk Switch, enables you to create SIP Trunks. If you have no hardware to connect, there is no reason that you can not put your users on a virtual switch. In fact if you have no copper connected to your VoIP deployment in the form of analog phones, telephone company analog lines or digital lines, your entire ShoreTel soltuion can be a figment of your imagination, living only in a virtual world, HQ server included!

Ingate apparently has made a Session Border Controller that is virtualized and may be integrated with the ShoreTel Trunk Switch, but we have yet been able to get a test device in our lab. Having a Virtual Switch configured and available as a “fail-over” solution or secondary switch in a ShoreTel deployment makes a lot of sense to us. You can configure the switch, put it live in your deployment and you only pay for it if you actually fail users over to it and you have 45 days to think about it! We have been able to successfully deploy ShoreTel in an Amazon Cloud, completely in software, using SIP trunks and remote phone registrations over VPN. There are lots of powerful options for deploying a virtualized ShoreTel, limited only by your imagination!

We attempted to deploy ShoreTel on an Oracle VirtualBox but keep running into an issue with the network adapter settings. The ESXi version of Vmware allows you to create a soft ethernet switch and route it to the rest of yoru network. The VirtualBox achieves the same flexibility allows you to NAT, Bridge or establish a host only NIC card. As the Virtualized ShoreTel switch needs to communicate with the rest of your deployment, you need configure the NIC card to Bridge or NAT. Both Fusion on a MAC and VMware Player on PC’s resulted in working ShoreTel switches without to much drama. We were able to bring up VMware Player on the ShoreTel HQ server and build out a Conference Server replacement for the SA-100 Hardware solution with little issue.

Candidly, these are not supported ShoreTel configurations, but we are just engineers playing with all the kool stuff! Remember that if you clone your virtual machines you will need to change the NetBios names and IP addresses before they can be useable in the same deployment. The embedded video is an overview of how to configure both the Free Oracle Virtual Box and the Vmware Fusion for Mac and Vmware Player for Windows to run ShoreTel. Keep the cards and letters coming and remember to support the GNU project!

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!

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!

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 Stock Update – Should Mitel and ShoreTel Merge?

Posted on December 10, 2013 by DrVoIP

Back in the summer we did a blog on ShoreTel from a Shareholders perceptive. There were a number of issues troubling us which did not seem to make sense and for which we, as outsiders, could not fully appreciate. Having purchased ShoreTel (NASDAQ: SHOR) at the IPO price of $10 a share, the stock was trading at about $3 this summer and had not yet found its bottom. We questioned why Management was in such as shambles with key players jumping ship, many for competitor Mitel. They were again in the process of doing yet another CEO search and had lost their VP of Marketing and several key sales executives had also migrated over to competitor Mitel (MITL) Corporation. We were also frustrated at the acquisition of a “hosted” PBX company that could not even make use of ShoreTel phones. These were very mixed messages and we were as you might suspect very bearish on the stock!

Less then six months later many of our concerns were addressed and the stock price at $8.45 seems to have rebounded, but still trades below the IPO price. ShoreTel now has a new CEO, Donald Joos, promoted from within the ranks, and with considerable credential. Today they announced that they had filled their long vacant VP of Marketing role with that of Mark Roberts, a former Mitel Executive, no less! (Mitel responded by announcing that it had hired 15 year ShoreTel Vertical Sales Executive Chuck Grogman as it’s new VP of Contact Center Sales). Aside from the obvious revolving door relationship between the executive suits of both companies, we believe these were smart moves for ShoreTel to make. ShoreTel has achieved new 52 week highs with a stock price of $3.25 – $8.45 and a Market Capitalization of $490M. By Comparison, Mitel has had a stock price of $2.80 – $9.85 and a Market capitalization of $528M. Both companies operate in the same space, use the same distribution channel and both offer hosted alternatives to their CPE product lines.

ShoreTel has introduced a new family of end points, or telephone sets that are sip enabled. This should make it possible for their hosted subsidiary to stop offering CISCO handsets! We expect a future ShoreTel iPBX software version to further blur the distinction between CPE and Hosted products, with ShoreTel able to offer both. Look for the new ShoreTel Version to be 1.0 not Version 15! We suspect that the dealer channel is a bit confused, having bitterly fought “hosted” with a CPE offering. Now with an entire new distribution channel opening through the former hosted companies sales partners, ShoreTel branded solutions are being offered by other than the traditional VAR channel. We also track Ring Central (RNG) and 8X8 (EGHT), both publicly reporting companies in the pure hosted space, to cross reference both ShoreTel and Mitel performance.

Over all, the prospects at ShoreTel from a Shareholder perspective are looking much better at the end of the year than they did at the start of the year. The CPE market will undergo continual pressure from the growing homogenization of technology through the adoption of SIP based technology. Even giant CISCO seems to be positioning SIP ahead of SCCP as the protocol of choice thanks to Jabber! The adoption of SIP will continue to drive down component hardware parts like Gateways and Handsets and is the primary reason we would like to see ShoreTel get out of the hardware business all together! ShoreTel should focus on building a scalable software technology that integrates with as much hardware in the market as can be standardized! At this point, we recommend ShoreTel as a hold with vigilant monitoring. You should keep a close watch on both Mitel and ShoreTel as well as monitoring Ring Central (RNG) and 8X8 for hedges and comparison in the hosted space. The entire sector will be undergoing an upheaval over the next year, so look for more mergers and spin offs to rule the market!

We welcome your comments and remind you that this is just our opinion!

Hacking ShoreTel!

Posted on August 5, 2013January 14, 2024 by DrVoIP

I though I had seen it all!

When you have been involved with the design, deployment and management of customer premise telephone systems for as long as we have, you think you have seen it all. Over the years as we learn from our mistakes we improve our “best practice” list to assure others gain from our experience. When I was barely a teenager, I learned how to assemble a string of MF tones using a Hammond organ keyboard. Recording two keys at a time, you could create toll call routing instructions that could be played back after making a 1-800 toll call before the terminating end answered! That, along with the famous Captain Crunch 2600Hz cereal box whistle, kept me and my friends entertained for years, stacking toll tandem switches and meeting other hackers in far away phone booths! Things have changed as in-band signaling has long ago been replaced with out of band signaling and whistles no longer work. Toll fraud however, continues to be a major source of unanticipated costs for business and the toll bandit syndrome is still alive and well in the Internet age.

Just like a web sever which uses well know port 8080 to serve up web pages, SIP phone systems use a common port. Scanning ports for open port 5060, then banging away for a user login and password to create a registration was child’s play and most companies now have this locked down. The fact that most Voice Mail systems used a common password was also a source of hacking entertainment, but now most manufacturers do not create mailboxes until someone needs one, eliminating a source of illegal phone calls though remote access. Direct Inward System Access or DISA used to be a favorite tool for making fraudulent toll calls. Users would call into the system, put in a pin and then be granted access to make phone calls. It did not take long to figure out how to abuse that feature!

Kevin Mitnick needs my help?

Like I said, just when you think you have seen it all, something new shows up. You have to laugh at how obvious and simple it was. I was recently contacted by a guy who you would think has seen it all, Kevin Mitnick. If that name does not immediately “ring a bell,” then maybe you might remember a couple of his books: The Art of Intrusion, The Art of Deception and most recently Ghost in the Wires. Kevin has not only seen it all, he has done it all! Anyway, Kevin was researching a compromised ShoreTel system for a client and wanted to compare notes with DrVoIP. Apparently someone had gained unauthorized access to the system and was making toll calls that were costing the target company a small fortune. If you have ever experienced toll fraud you know that your vulnerability is broadcast all of the Internet in just a matter of minutes.You will find yourself explaining to Homeland Security why you are making so many phone calls to Dubai!

Kevin had a sheet of CDR records that showed the date and time of the calls. Unfortunately the calls seemed to be originating from the Automated Attendant so they could not be traced to a particular extension number within the system. We brain stormed some possibilities. I thought for sure this had to be an inside job! Maybe someone was using the “find me follow me” feature, but that would only send the call to a single number. These calls were all over the map! Literally all over the globe! ShoreTel does not have a DISA feature and VM boxes do not exist unless they are assigned to a user. The password must be changed as a part of the setup process. So how was this system hacked?

Well, I could tell you but that would take all the fun out of hearing from you as to your thoughts on how this was done. I will promise you that it takes one to know one and Kevin, genius that he is, figured this out, not I! Even DrVoIP was taken in by this clever ruse! Post your comments below with your thoughts on how this was accomplished and we will send you the puzzle answer Kevin uncovered. My thinking is that all we can ever hope to do is to raise the bar, keeping out the less sophisticated mice. There will always be someone smarter, someone more dedicated and focused, who will make it his mission to crack your safe!

Updated with Answer September 1, 2013

– Well a couple of people actually broke the code (excuse the pun)! What Kevin learned was that one of the great flaws in VoIP is the complete lack of control when it comes to secure Caller ID! Simply stated, there is no security or verification of Caller ID! Using any number of readily available tools, it is possible to spoof your caller ID. You can make your phone display any number you want! ShoreTel has a voice mail feature that enables you to listen to a voice message and then return the call by pushing a voice mail menu option key! This is a very handy feature, especially if you are calling into your voice mail from you car, just hit the “return call” option and provided the system was able to capture the inbound Caller ID, the ShoreTel will place an outgoing call to that number and conference you in! So lets put this simple ShoreTel hack together – the hackers gained control of a voice mail box, then called into the ShoreTel Voice Mail system with a spoofed Caller ID and the left a brief message. Calling back into the system, this time to check their voice messages and then hit the “return call” option key, which then placed a call to an International Middle East location all billed to the the ShoreTel system owner and showing up only as a Call Detail Record owned by the Automated Attendant. Great feature, but we would recommend that you don’t allow the VM system to place International phone calls! Thanks to all who took time to write and special thanks to Kevin Mitnick for a really fun Service Call!

What is going on at ShoreTel now?

Posted on June 13, 2013 by DrVoIP

I very seldom comment, in this technology blog, on company policy and just try to stay focused on VoIP. This time I am speaking out as a ShoreTel Shareholder.You know, one of the people who bought into the $10 a share IPO (at about the time they were suddenly sued by Mitel for patent infringement)? ShoreTel stock (SHOR) is now trading at $3.50 or so? The company has been through at least three CEOs post start up. They are now scouting for yet another. Every key executive in the non-Engineering side of the house has jumped ship. What do you do when your key sales people go to work for a competitor, like Mitel? What signal does that send to the market?

ShoreTel had a real lead on VoIP technology. They make excellent products. They have had, and still have, some really great people! Leadership, at this point, is lacking.There have been some clear mistakes! Acquiring a “hosted PBX company” that cannot even use ShoreTel phones? Come on, I know I am a bit dense but really? (Note: “Follow the Money”.) The acquisition of the Mobility Router company, Agito Networks, made some strategic sense, but there has been no real follow through. (The secret weapon that was acquired from Agito was the SIP over TLS, which should have replaced the OEM VPN strategy ages ago, and built into ShoreTel phones and Gateways.) Just like their OEM acquisitions of previous products like the conference server, this will end up being yet another boat anchor!

I was hopeful that someone would buy ShoreTel before it becomes another Altigen (ATGN)! When I see Directors and the company’s own counsel filing Form 4s with the SEC, that does not sound very likely either. ShoreTel was the iPhone/iPad but like those products, it has fallen behind. The competitors are moving in with updated solutions and it has lost its luster. The adopted cloud strategy was a poorly placed wager on what could have been a winning strategy. They have missed the Virtualization market completely. Actually, very sad indeed! Maybe Mitel (MITL) does have it right? Maybe these two companies will merge? Why not, most of their executives have?

CISCO UCCX or ShoreTel ECC – CCadmin script and power to the Supervisor!

Posted on May 9, 2013 by DrVoIP

If you have managed a contact center of any size, sooner or later, you will be asked to make a change on demand. A contact center supervisor feels the need to have a “team” meeting in the middle of the work day and needs the entire staff to be present. This means nobody will be logged in to take calls. This is the point they call you, the contact center administrator, and ask that you not only close the queue but record a new closed greeting. This happens so often that we determined to automate the process and put the power of opening and closing a queue in the hands of the Supervisor or Team leader. We created a Script, named CCAdmin, that is always running and waiting for a Supervisor to call it and make that famous request.

In the case of the CISCO UCCX, the script makes use of the Recording Step and the ability to read an XML document. Each operating script in the contact center has a “getstatus” subflow at the start of each script. This subflow checks an XML document, named for the queue, that has a single status variable. This is a simple boolean operation and it is either set to true or false. During normal operations it is set to false. The main queue script calls the subflow, finds the status as false and continues its normal routine of servicing clients. If however, the status is true, meaning that we have a special closing, the script branches to the closed section of the script and plays a special closed greeting, made by the Supervisor when they called into the CCAdmin script.

The CallCenterAdmin script has the matching setstatus subflow that is checked by the main script. When a Supervisor calls into the CallCenterAdmin script, they are prompted to select their queue by menu number. They are asked to Press 1 to open a Queue or 2 to close the queue and make a new recording. Then they are prompted for a PIN, which compares to a previously stored Integer to determine the Supervisors authority to make a queue closure. Assuming the PIN is correct, the CallCenterAdmin script, then prompts them to make their recording, thanks them and hangs up. The CallCenterAdmin script then setstatus to true and waits for the next request. All of the queue scripts in the call center have the getstatus subflow as part of their normal definition. As each script launches it tests for status and if closed plays the newly recored closed script and hangs up. When the Supervisor desires to open the queue again, they just place a call to the CCAdmin script and start over.

Though the concept is very straight forward there were a few kool tricks that needed to be developed. First of all, you need to define a naming convention that allows you to use a standard XML naming convention. So if we are checking the getstatus of the CustomerServiceStatus.xml we could use the same code we used to check the getstatus of the TechnicalSupportStatus.xml document. The setstatus of the CCAdmin script would also have to address this challenge. Likewise, making a recording and naming it so that you could use the same body of code or script was also an interesting brain teaser. CISCO UCCX enables the creation of Recordings wihtin a script, but ShoreTel does not. Likewise, CISCO UCCX can make use of XML documents as the database record, but ShoreTel would need a flat file or OBDC connector. I have been able to do the same script on a ShoreTel ECC, but I had to use a standard closed announcement as changing files in ShoreTel ECC on the fly, is not possible. You can point to a different previously recorded wav file, but you cant create on on the fly.

The application however, is very useful and we now deploy this as a standard for all Contact Centers we deploy. I will ultimately get the entire CCAdmin script into the lesson library along with the full prompt library as recorded by the first lady of all our prompts, Karen Brace of OnHoldAdvertising