Voip Service & Solutions Archives - Page 6 of 21 - DrVoIP

Add DNIS routing to your ShoreTel ECC Contact Center!

Posted on May 20, 2016 by DrVoIP

Why Route by DNIS?

Routing by the number the caller dialed, or DNIS is the preferred routing strategy for any Call Center call flow. Clearly you can assign a DID phone number to a specific call flow and anyone who knocks on that door is answered by the same group of agents. It is much more efficient to grab the DNIS information, however, and use it to index a database to retrieve the call routing information. In this way, we only need one door to the call center! The DNIS might be used to route a call to the proper product or service group and it may also be used to retrieve client information that the call center Agent needs to see displayed in order to provide a custom care answer prompt.

Consider the requirements of a Hospital that is providing “centralized scheduling services” for 1000’s of primary care physicians. When the inbound call is presented to the Agent, the requirement is that the caller be greeted with a customized answer prompt. For Example: “Doctor Leary’s office, are you calling to make an appointment?” or “Thank you for calling Doctor Williams”. This type of dynamic call handling can best be managed by using DNIS information to retrieve the Doctor’s name from a database We do this regularly in CISCO UCCX and ShoreTel ECC Call Center solutions and the process is essentially the same for both solutions.

ShoreTel ECC Route by DNIS example

First, we need to create a DNIS Map in the ShoreTel PBX; a ‘route point/IRN ‘ combination to pass the call to the ECC; and an ODBC connector from the ECC server to your favorite SQL database server. The SQL server would host the database your scripting application needs to access in order to obtain the correct answer prompt. Lets assume that the database contains a very simple table structure:

DABASE = DNIS_listofDoctorsOffices = (Field1 = DNIS Number, Filed2 = OfficeName, Field3 = QUEUE_IRN)

You would then write a simple script to take the incoming DNIS information and use it to index the database and get the OfficeName and maybe the Customer Service Queue that handles that office (City or State or what have you). There is no limit to the information you could retrieve and present to the Agent, For example: Name, Service Class (Platnium, Gold or Silver), Renewal date, last order, shipment date, the list goes on. In this simple example the script would take the DNIS and use a SQL expression to retrieve the answer prompt data:

Select * from DNISlistof DoctosOffices where DNIS = %DNIS_NAME%

Creating a DNIS MAP in ShoreTel iPBX

In the ShoreTel iPBX Trunk Group it is necessary to create a DNIS map for two reasons: First, the ShoreTel ECC can not read the DNIS directly, it requires the administrator to fill in the “dialed number” column in the DNIS map. The ECC has a mandatory call profile filed named DNIS-NAME which will be auto filled with the information you provide in the DNIS map “dialed number” column. Secondly, unlike a DID number that might be directly mapped to an extension, we need a way to get the incoming call connected to the IRN on the ECC that is running the DNIS SQL lookup Script. In this example, the Destination field of the DNIS Digit Map in the ShoreTel iPBX Truk Group points to the Route Point/IRN in the ECC that supports the script.

POPing the Agent Display with useful Data

The ShoreTel ECC has two variables data types: Mandatory or System Variables; and User create Variables. The Mandatory variables are system call parameters like ANI or DNIS and a long list of other system based data. ANI contains the digits that make up the caller identification and that is also often used to retrieve database information. If you are using ANI you will need to do some string manipulation to strip off the +1 from the 10 digit number, or format to match your database. User created variables are the name you create for the fields you will get from your database. Useful examples would be CustomerName, DateOfService, AccountBalance and RenewalDate. Any Variable, User created or System, can be pushed out to the Agent Display within the ShoreTel Communicator.

What is your Call Center Application Requirement

We have seen it all, so we are always interested in your requirements for custom CRM integration and Call Flow management. Give us call or drop us an email and play “stump the vendor”. We would love the challenge of finding yet another new ShoreTel ECC or CISCO UCCX Contact Center application requirement!

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What Carrier can provide Fiber to my branch office?

Posted on May 5, 2016 by DrVoIP

What Carrier do I use for this location?

If are responsible for planning out a WAN connectivity solution for your VoIP deployment, you need to know what carrier services your target circuit location. This can lead to the most frustrating experiences an engineer can have! You actually have to rely on someone else to provide information so you can finish your work! Even a simple point to point VPN tunnel requires you to figure out what carrier options are available at your target location. How do you do that? Start calling a list of carriers and asking the first line call center sales folks if they can provide an internet circuit to your branch office in Syracuse, New York? You do a google search and you end up with a list of possible candidates and then you start your outbound calling! Maybe you have a friend who is a sales rep for a circuit aggregator, so you try that option.

The secret Carrier database!

What if you could go to a website, you don’t even need to talk with a sales person, you just plug in an address and Viol! A list of all the Carriers that can service that location magically appears! X marks the spot of every Fiber drop that carrier has in the specified distance from your target address. Not just the carrier your aggregator wants to show you, but all the carriers that can service that target location. You even get a Google map street photo of the location! What if you could just click on that magic X and get a quote! Now that is freaking awesome!

We have been working on a very large WAN deployment to a ShoreTel system that has over 500 branch offices! Now try and knit together that circuit map without a database resource that you can directly tap. We discovered a website that makes the process as simple as entering a location address. Blow out your candle Pilgrim you search has ended, just click here enter a Street location and you you will get a list of carrier solutions.

The good folks at BuildingIT have made finding WAN solutions as simple as locating an Uber Driver! You don’t have to talk to a sales person, but if you do, they have some of the smartest circuit folks in the industry. Can’t find fiber for your Laramie WO location, ask sales to quote a solution through the website and they will come back with any number of alternative solutions, priced and ready for the next phase of your deployment, installation. They even offer bundled project management so you don’t have to worry the deploy. One throat to choke, one website to research and one solution that makes a lot of sense to us!

ShoreTel lsp_ping and the SG-Vphone coma!

Posted on March 31, 2016 by DrVoIP

Ping a network engineers best friend!

Most network folks are comfortable with a standard Ping command. Some even know that you can add options to ping to set packet size and repetitions, but at the end of the day, Ping is a level three ICMP command.

Ping Command Syntax

ping [-t] [-a] [-n count] [-l size] [-f] [-i TTL] [-v TOS] [-r count] [-s count] [-w timeout] [-R] [-S srcaddr] [-4] [-6] target [/?]

As an example: ping -n 5 -l 1500 www.google.com the ping command is used to ping the hostname www.google.com. The -n option tells the ping command to send 5 ICMP Echo Requests instead of the default of 4 and the -l option sets the packet size for each request to 1500 bytes instead of the default of 32 bytes.

Ping is generally a knee jerk reaction for a network engineer! It will establish and demonstrate connectivity between network devices. It can be used to determine latency and jitter and is a very quick, effective and easy to execute network test tool.

ShoreTel Connectivity

ShoreTel administrators learn very quickly that the first place you go when someone complains about the phone system is the ShoreWare Director portal to the “Quick Look” section. You quickly scan the screen for RED! (That is what is so simple about alarms: Green is good, Yellow means something needs attention and Red is bad)! In this example the site known as Carol can not connect with the the Bob site. Bob however can connect with the Ted and Alice Sites. Carol can also connect with the Ted and Alice sites. How do you visualize this in ShoreTel? You go to the second screen and by clicking on Connectivity and you see the famous ShoreTel Christmas Tree!

This is very not good! Sites can not communicate and calls are failing all over the place! For example the trunk group that terminates on HQ SGT1K-03 (Line 13), for example will not be able to complete an incoming call to a user on the user switch Central Time Zone (Line2). The RED box at the intersection of two lines helps you visualize connectivity or lack of connectivity. Why is this happening?

Lets Ping and find out!

The network engineer will undoubtedly do a Ping test. You will ping from the source IP address of one site, to the destination ip address of the other sites device. Now if the test fails, the next step is to figure out where the network connection is broken. The more challenging problem is more perplexing. What happens if the Ping is succesful? You do your Ping test and you get an excellent reply and the network is not broken at the Layer 3 level. What then?

Enter lsp_ping

ShoreTel has a proprietary protocol named lsp_ping. This ping makes it possible to test network connectivity at the higher L4, transport level by enabling you to Ping with a port number. In the example Bob can Ping Carol, so why is the BOX red? The answer might be to run an lsp-ping command. Unlike Ping which you can run from your local computer to a destination ip address, you will need to telenet or Ssh into a ShoreGear switch to run lsp_ping. To do this you will need to run the ipbxctl security command from a ShoreTel server first, then telnet into the device and run your test. It will look something like this:

lsp_ping “192.168.10.12”, 100

This will setup a ping to port 5440 at the target device of 192.168.10.12 and the quotations are required! The comma 100 means, send 100 packets in this test.

What is lsp_ping?

Shoregear switches all keep a copy of the current configuration and know where the end points (i.e. handsets ) are and how to get there. This is one of the strong points of the ShoreTel architecture. You do not need to check with a server to get the current configuration, and if the server crashes, ShoreTel keeps on trucking! The proprietary lsp or location service protocol, keeps updating configurations around the deployment reporting any changes. They do this through ports like 5440 and if they can not update, they assume that switch is off line and thus you can not connect to it.

If you study the screen shot above and you knew the IP address of all the devices, you would be puzzled as to why two devices in the same subnet, using the same network path, going through the same network connection should have different connectivity status reports? Every engineer has asked “what changed in the network” and every client answers the same; “nothing”. If is always frustrating when you get a situation reported like the graphic above. A working network for months with no problem and then suddenly the Christmas tree appears! Especially when everyone reports that nothing has changed in the network!

ShoreTel TAC will always tell you a failure of lsp_ping means a network issue. Most times it is, but this time it was not!

The take away from this discussion is that Ping can establish network layer connectivity, but ShoreTel can still have a connectivity failure. You will then need to trouble shoot higher up the stack and look at the transport level and perhaps the application level. In this scenario, we mirrored all network traffic to a packet capture device. We ran Wireshark on the packet captures while doing lsp_ping and were surprised to see that lsp_pings on port 5440 were in fact not only sent, but received by the traget device, yet no answer packets were returned. At first we though that it might be that a UDP packet, being connection-less, would not report, but looking at working sessions we determined we should see a return packet!

ShoreTel V-phone virtual appliance coma!

The interesting fact in this mess was that the failure was always between the two sites (main location and a data center); and that the pair was always a hardware switch and a virtual switch! The virtual switch seemed to be in some kind of coma as it did not return lsp_ping packets yet showed green in quick look. As the issue was causing major ShoreTel call failure and a lot of people had investigated the network with no root cause identified, a decision was made to rebuild all the virtual switches or Vphone and Vtrunk as ShoreTel calls these linux based OVA files. This cleared the problem with no changes to the network and all is now Green!

Summary Recommendation on SG-Vphone and SG-Vtrunk

We recommend the use of ShoreTel SG-Vphone virtual appliances only as failover and not as production resources. Inside those ShoreGear Orange boxes is a rack full of dedicated micro-processors that provide DSP or digital signal processing resouces. When these are vitualized all that processing most now be done in software. What a work load!

Compare CISCO and ShoreTel “dial plans” and “calling priviledges”!

Posted on February 29, 2016 by DrVoIP

What is a route or dial plan?

Most if not all phone systems provide for route plans and calling or “class of service” privileges. The dial plan defines the over all numbering system used through out the system. For example, how many digits do we need to define all of our extension number or telephone endpoints? What access code do we use to indicate we want an outside line? What numbers will we set aside for system features like the automated attendant, voice mail, contact center and conference servers? Generally this is one of the first decisions you make when designing a new phone system. Once set, it is usually very cumbersome to alter or refine.

Calling privileges or “class of service” defines what facilities a specific user might have access to. For example, we might want the Lobby and Kitchen phones to be able to dial 911 and make internal calls, but we might restrict them from dialing outside numbers at all, let alone long distance or international phone calls. Some systems even restrict internal extensions from calling other internal extension numbers. For example you might isolate the CEO from being dialed by the automated attendant “dial by name” directory and you certainly do not want the over head paging system accessible by an outside caller!

How do we include a new branch with the same internal Extension numbers?

These options become increasingly more complex as organizations redefine themselves as a result of a merger or acquisition. How do you add that new branch office into the company phone system? Things become even more exciting when the new office has a “dial plan” that uses the same internal extension numbers already in use by the HQ phone system. ShoreTel and CISCO tackle this in very different ways and it is interesting to note the different strategies.

In ShoreTel you define you “dial plan” as the necessary first step in designing the phone system. How many digits do we need to dial internal telephone numbers? Out of the box, ShoreTel assumes you want to use three digit extension numbers. You can change them to four, five or more digits but you can only do this once. You can increase extension digit length but you can not reduce them, so plan carefully! The next issue is what range will we use for extension numbers? Will they start with 1, 2 or some other digit? Don’t forget those “system extensions” as you will need them for many features and system resources.

ShoreTel also uses the concept of a User Group and a Class of Service. A user group might be a function like Executive, Manager, Employee and House phones. The Class of service defines Telephone Features, Calling privileges and Mailbox options. Telephone features might include who can access the Intercom, or record their own phone calls. Calling privileges enable internal, local and long distance dialing options. Finally mail box options indicate the size of messages, greetings and administrative controls.

ShoreTel has a very simple to implement and understand concept for dialing plans and calling privileges. With simplicity, however, comes some restrictions. Lets take the example of acquiring a new business unit and they have an existing dial plan that conflicts with the one already in place. Well, you could through the inplace phone system out and install ShoreTel at that location (certainly the ShoreTel re-sellers plan) by expanding the existing ShoreTel but that would certainly mean an change in extension numbers at the newly acquired business unit. Optionally, you could install another ShoreTel system and integrate the two separate system through a SIP tie-trunk. Using a digit translation strategy you could let the other guys keep there old extension numbers but you would have two separate telephone systems, each with their own configuration database. (In CISCO parlance that would be a two “cluster” solution).

ShoreTel Simple or CISCO Complex?

CISCO uses the concept of “route patterns” to define a dial plan. It is a bit more complex, but with that complexity comes great flexibility. A “route pattern” is a map for taking the digits a user dials and searching a database to find the route those digits should follow to complete the call. For example, a user in the California Office might dial 9,1-212-523-51234 to reach extension 234 in the New York office. The route pattern would then hit route list that might include a local PRI for a long distance call to NY, dropping the 9 and out dialing the E164 1+area code and number. That route list might also include a WAN gateway that directly terminates in NY and in that case, drops all the digits but the 234 while placing the call over the company’s WAN connection.

To be fair, ShoreTel can also complete a call over the WAN and would be smart enough to know that #234 also has a DID number of 212-523-51234. If the California user dialed #234, and the call could not be routed over the WAN, the call would be completed over the Long distance line using “PSTN fail over”. The feature does not, however work the other way. Had the user dialed the LD number and encountered a network busy condition, it could not then route the call over the WAN.

As to”class of service”, CISCO uses the concept of a “partition” and a “calling search space” (i.e. CSS). Though some folks like the “lock and key” metaphor, we think the best way to understand this is to realize that “partitions” define who can call me. “Calling Search Spaces” define who I can call. So if my line or phone is in a CSS that specifies partitions NYPhones, SFPhones, UKPhones, Windstream, COX and Verizon, then those are the objects I can call. If my device is in a partition named SFPhones and your CSS does not contain that Partition, then you can not call me.

Sounds a bit confusing, and at times it is. The structure however enables us to build some very significant solutions. Take that example in which you have phones with the same extension number in two different business units in the same “cluster” or phone system. You could put Extension 1234 in the NYPhones partition and in the SFPhones partition! They would not conflict with each other! Every phone, feature (i.e. intercom, conference), line in a CISCO deployment is in a specific “partition” and only reachable by an entity that has a Calling Search Space that includes that partition. Simple!

Given that we are not in the business of selling phone system, only engineering and supporting them, We do not have an emotional attachment to one over the other. We observe that ShoreTel is best suited for smaller deployments and in fact can be easily deployed and managed by a small business of 25 or more. Though there are larger ShoreTel deployments, we see them in the 100 – 1000 user line size most frequently. CISCO has a low end Solutions, the Business Edition 6K-S for system under 150 users, but the CISCO Collaboration solution could run a small a small country though the Business Edition 6K and 7K are optimized for 100 – 5000 users!

The video shows the two different approaches to solving these common route plan issues!

Trouble Shooting ShoreTel ECC Scripts

Posted on January 22, 2016 by DrVoIP

ShoreTel ECC Future?

The ShoreTel ECC or enterprise contact center is a remarkable product in many ways. Though we are depressed to see that it has apparently taken a back seat to ShoreTel Connect as it relates to product enhancements, it remains a formidable player in the contact center space. Clearly, if you are deploying a ShoreTel phone system, then it may be the only viable option. We note that ShoreTel has made a new acquisition for contact center functionality in the cloud, so the potential of supporting ECC product enhancements may even be less hopeful as product development resources shift to the “cloud” and ShoreTel Connect.

Remember EasyRun?

We have worked with the ECC since before it was a ShoreTel product. It actually originated as an OEM product, a re-branding of a software solution brought to market by EasyRun, an Israeli based company founded by Avi Silber, long time VP of Software Development for Telrad. ShoreTel ultimately executed a software source code licnese and the rest is history. Unfortunately, we seem stalled at Version 9 of ECC, which was not a major evolutionary step from ECC Version 8.

At any rate, the product does a super job in small to medium sized Call Centers and meets the minimum daily adult requirement for call center functionality. One particular function enables the system to integrate with popular database solutions like Microsoft SQL. This enables the system to take on some very sophisticated applications that include routing inbound calls based on the return of data in the customer service database. One of them most asked questions of marketing professionals as it relates to Contact Centers: “are all customers created equal”. You might want to route an incoming call based on the callers status in your customer database as a Platinum client or as a deadbeat on credit hold.

SQL database dips are almost essential for any Contact Center offering. ShoreTel enables this functionality through OBDC connectors to the host SQL server or CRM system. One of the challenges for design and implementation engineers is testing the design and results of the SQL data dip. Historically, ShoreTel has not provided a lot of debug tools here and documentation on inner workings of the ECC is not generally available. If you are bold and go poking around in the BIN files, you will note a lot of exe files and if you are curious, brave and inquisitive you might take on an exploration of what these files are used for.

Undocumented ShoreTel Debuggers!

One file in particular seems to launch a very useful test tool. We have never found any documentation on it, and it has become something of a legend among we ECC implementation engineers. If you are fortunate enough to maintain a relationship with other engineers that share information, you can build up a library of useful tools based on shared results from others. Kudu’s to one such brilliant engineer, Bill Fraedrich for sharing his growing list of FC_Thingy functions and the other members of the development community who regularly publish results.

Route Caller by ANI (caller ID)?

Recently we had to create a SQL data dip to pull back a customer record using Caller ID or ANI as the database index. Now anybody who has done any Contact Center CRM integration regardless of vendor, knows that you have to do some string manipulations to strip off the +1 that will be passed by the carrier as part of the ANI information. ShoreTel ECC, CISCO UCCX, it does not matter it is all relatively the same. Once you clean up the ANI you can pass it off as part of a SELECT command and go get your data. Then manipulate the data to find the fields you are looking for to make your routing determination.

The undocumented debugger!

The issue becomes how do debug a script that is not producing the results your design expected? Again, ShoreTel comes up short here as it relates to documented debug tools. The CISCO UCCX, for example, has a step by step debugger built right into the script editor, which is really helpful for those of us who have to design, implement and test these scripts. It turns out that ShoreTel has one as well, you just have to know where to find it. Again it is not documented and is well known only to those that know it well.

In this video clip we take a look at the tool and show an example of how you might use it to unravel a particular SQL data dip problem. We have found a number of these tools and we are always looking for documentation and road maps produced by those who have gone this way before! Next blog we will take a look at a TAPI debugger that is also very useful when troubleshooting ShoreTel phone system Communicator issues.

At any rate, the ShoreTel ECC has great potential and is a wonderful solution when applied in the proper environment. You can create some very sophisticated routing applications based on a variety of CRM integration, custom software solutions and IVR scripts. Despite all our grumbling and complaining, we have not found anything we cant make work on a ShoreTel ECC!

CISCO Version 11 – New “Conference Now” feature!

Posted on January 18, 2016 by DrVoIP

Is your ShoreTel or CISCO Audio Conference Secure?

Most all phone systems have some embedded resource for ad-hock audio conferences, ShoreTel and CISCO are no different. CISCO, like ShoreTel, had “meet me” conference facilities, but it had one serious flaw. Anyone could dial into the conference bridge, even after the conference had started and there was no security against “lurkers”. This made the conference facility the last place you would hold a team meeting or corporate strategy discussion! Optionally both vendors addressed this with add-on conference applications usually requiring a separate server and additional licensing based on number of ports or supported users. CISCO offered the now defunct Meeting Place server and ShoreTel still offers its own Conference server application. How frustrating is that! Deploy a brand new phone system only to find out it has limited conferencing functionality without an additional investment.

CISCO Conference Now in Version 11

CISCO for one, has now addressed this in the most recent release of CISCO Unified Call Manager, Version 11. A new feature, “Conference Now” has been added to the still available meet me conference facilities. Setup is relatively simple and now provides password protection for conference ports. Call into the Conference Now IVR application and you will be prompted for a meeting ID and a password. The password is provided by the “host” who must be a participate before the conference can begin. Advanced features like calendaring still require an external conference facility, but if you are looking for audio conference security, this is an ideal solution and is bundled as a basic feature of CUCM Version 11!

Basic Configuration

Conference Now Configuration is simple and a new line entry in CUCM Call routing administrator web page. Just give the application a Directory Number, Route Partition, a Description and set the maximum time the bridge should wait for the “host” to join before dumping everyone! You can also select a Music source that provides the media conference attendees will hear until the host joins! Then Set Media Resources, Confirm that IVR is registered with phone system and that it is be part of Media Resource Group.

Users must have the “Conference Now” privileged enabled before they can establish conference sessions. Under User Management you enable the users privilege to use this as a host and set their PIN. A good practice is to set that users extension number as the Meeting Number. Granted, not the most secure solution as you basically establish the same attendee access code for all that users conference sessions, but it is way more usable than the previous meet me conference solution.

Select or Create Custom Prompts!

There is a library of CISCO provided prompts to support this IVR application, but you can create custom prompts and select them as appropriated!

As embedded Conference facilities go, this is about the best we have seen. It is a standard Call Manager feature and can be enabled by individual User and provides password protection for Conferences in session!

CISCO Configuration Professional Express

Posted on January 13, 2016 by DrVoIP

When you lease expect it, expect it!

We were deploying a new CISCO Voice Gateway, a CISCO 2921 with a PRI and mistakenly pointed a browser at the LAN Interface while searching for the CUCM URL! Sometimes accidents result in new information. We generally do not use Configuration Manger so we were very surprised when the browser returned the following screen.

What Can you do with it?

After the initial WTF? We started to poke around and what we found was more than interesting! This is a lightweight version of CISCO Configuration Professional, embedded in the router flash memory and it is enabled by default on newly Minted access routers. Currently, Version 2.7 is shipping and it has both an Admin portal and a User Portal. The Admin portal is enabled and shipped on the router. If you want to add the Use Portal (I have no clue why you would do that) you have to download and install additional software to flash memory. The System enables base configuration of key components like WAN links, VLANs, User, DHCP and SSID management. It has a Quick Setup Wizard and some interesting Router Diagnostics! There are also basic troubleshooting tools like Ping and Trace to assist debug efforts.

“Plug and Play” Option

There is also and an option for a “Plug and Play” server as part of the Prime Infrastructure support to automate remote deployments. If you are deploying a multi-site solution, this can significantly speed things along allowing for centralized planning, design, installation and management. Ship the router to someone who is capable of plugging in the right cables and off you go! The router finds the gateway, sends a request to the mother ship, identifies itself by serial number and can then download firmware and configuration files! Reload, up and running!

When folks wonder why they should pay more for a CISCO router when they can get Brand X for so much less, you might think about the impacts this can have on total deployment and maintenance costs! It had a great beat and it was easy to dance to, we gave it a 10!

Cloud based Next Gen Firewalls?

Posted on January 7, 2016 by DrVoIP

Firewall or Security Appliance?

Along with the general tend for business to move to a subscription based, recurring revenue model, the ubiquitous firewall has also moved to the cloud! In the case of the firewall, however, there is measurable and dynamic benefit to be realized by coupling your firewall to a cloud based subscription. The “wild west” that characterizes the internet in the 21st century demands a dynamic, self healing, unified treat management strategy! It is no longer acceptable to use simple statefull packet inspection based firewalls that limit activity based on network layer source and destination IP address matching. Firewalls must now become “security appliance” solutions! Content Filtering Intrusion detection and prevention and a growing shared database of malware protection with cross referenced “reputation” based real time analysis is now the minimum daily adult requirement for network Internet work security.

Most of the popular firewalls in the commercial market place now couple some form of a subscription service to the base cost of the actual hardware. Generally these subscriptions are spam and email filtering solutions at the low end, but include very advanced content filtering and malware protection at the high end. Effective content filtering and malware protection requires access to a ever growing database where global information about daily treat and reputation analysis can be analyzed and shared among subscribers. Identity based networking is also an essential component in managing network resource access. Group policies that limit the facilities that the “guest” wireless network can access and the bandwidth that it can use, from the facilities and bandwidth that the corporate user can access begin to define the minimum specification for network computing.

Meet My Meraki!

We are particularly fond of the Meraki solution as a good fit alongside of the more sophisticated CISCO Next Generation and “SourceFire” solutions. Both technologies are recent CISCO acquisitions and significantly expand the company’s well established range of threat management, Identity and VPN solutions. The Meraki products are not only subscription based, but are truly “cloud” resident. This makes it very attractive for IT teams or Managed Service Providers to remotely install, configure and monitor geographically distributed firewalls and VPN devices. When coupled with the subscriptions for ongoing software updates, the system provides unparalleled cost/benefit performance in the following key areas:

Identity Based Access and User Group Policy Control – Local or Active Directory definition of users and guest
Intrusion Prevention – Active before, during and after monitoring of known treats
VPN Automation – Mesh or Hub and Spoke configurations to integrate remote offices and work groups
Content Filtering – Limit internet access by specif URL or Group like “peer to peer”, “file sharing” or “Social Media”.
Anti Malware and Anti Phishing – Active scanning of all HTTP traffic
High Availability and Fail over – Device and connection security through multiple uplinks
Application Visibility and Control – Know exactly who is using what and how much!
Centralized Management – Log into the device through your cloud based “dashboard

Content Filtering and Central Management

Content Filtering is based on subject matter or specific site URL and is intuitive to configure as show below. The group polices enable you to assign content filtering based on Active Directory identity and group authentication. Guest log in pages enable visitors network access. All of this functionality is dynamically made current through subscriptions and is centrally managed through a “dashboard” that is defined in the “cloud” and accessible by authorized personnel from anywhere on the Internet!

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Put your ShoreTel to work automating “Interviews” and “Surveys”

Posted on November 27, 2015 by DrVoIP

Customer Survey or Order Entry

One of the most requested IVR applications we are regularly asked when working with the ShoreTel product line is can we create a “customer survey” or automated voice “order entry” solution. In this application the caller is answered and greeted by an automated attendant. The callers is then asked a number of questions. All the individual answers are collected as a single voice file and sent to a predetermined voice mail box for later bulk processing. This application is actually simple to create and because it uses actual voice recordings rather than touch tone, there is no data processing requirement to review the results.

The solution makes use of features available in the basic ShoreTel iPBX and as many “survey applications” are part of a Call Center, like the ShoreTel ECC, this application does not require any special equipment or additional servers. In addition to to asking customized, recorded questions that support the survey or order entry application, an automated attendant like menu can be attached to the voice questioner that offer additional options to the caller when the questioner is complete. The caller can start-over, transfer to the Operator, transfer to another application or append to the existing question stream. For example, the caller might want to place an order for additional products or services.

The application also captures the normal accounting information to support the recording including date, time and callerID. As the answers are assembled as a single voice message, they can be emailed when the caller hangs up and a message waiting light or other notification alert set!

VoiceXML!

Call Our Demo Line!

The Applications enables XML tags that define actions, for example: Play a file; Record, GoTo and Menu. These simple actions can be organized to enable robust applications. The Menu file can be used to send the caller to yet another script or forward to an operator.

We created a live demo, if you would like to give it a try give us a call and we will transfer you to the demo!!

Quick Peek at ShoreTel Connect – What’s in ShoreTel V15!

Posted on October 25, 2015 by DrVoIP

Deploy in the Cloud, on premise or Both!

For those of us who have been working with ShoreTel since version 3.1, the introduction of a new ShoreTel release is always exciting! The marketing folks are naming this release, ShoreTel Connect to underscore the full power of a deployment that integrates both the customer premise with the flexibility of a cloud solution. It may be Version 1 of ShoreTel Connect, but it builds on all that ShoreTel has learned over the years and will always be ShoreTel Version 15 to the rest of us. The product extends ShoreTel’s history of distributed switching to now include cloud components like a new “Edge Server”. As we were fortunate enough to be deploying for a new client, we though we would share our first impressions and show you the new Shoreware Connect administration interface and the ShoreTel Connect client!

The product is now in controlled release and shipping to new client deployments. There is a direct upgrade and migration path if you are on at least ShoreTel 13 of the iPBX, Version 8 of the ECC and Mobility 7! Reinstall or step upgrades will be required if you are on an earlier version of ShoreTel. You will need to shed the 32 bit operating systems as the new release runs only on supported 64 bit 2008 and 2012 Servers. The Virtual appliance OVA images introduced in Verson 14 are still available and though you can virtualize with VMware ESXi 5/5.1 or Hyper-v 6, we believe that the appliances still only run on ESXi hosts only.

New high density Switches!

Going forward ShoreTel is focused on its 400 family of SIP phones. They have also introduced some new high density ShoreGear Switches including a 500 port switch, a 48 port analog switch and dual T1/E1 switches! No longer will you need to trade DSP resources to enable analog or media termination points and they have even enhanced the paging port with a contact closure! We are very pleased to see the addition of an ova file that enables you to field a distributed voice mail server as a Linux appliance! Hopefully ShoreTel can continue to migrate away from Microsoft servers, further reducing cost and increasing up time! The fat desktop client has been replaced with a browser like client thus eliminating the need for a Microsoft desktop. In fact, the administrative interface no longer demands an IE browser as Safari, FireFox and Chrome are now supported! Clearly, this means that the ECC client has changed as well!

New ShoreTel Connect administration Portal and desktop client!

ShoreTel Connect can be deployed as a cloud solution, as a completely CPE solution or as a “hybrid” solution that blends both componet options. We have not had time yet to study the firewall traversal options, but I am sure this has all been thought out! The accompanying video will give you a quick overview of the administrator interface and the new client. We will continue the video development as we complete the deployment, sharing what we have learned along the way and updating our video training library. Hit us up with questions and challenges! We are long time Cloud Architects!