It happens every year, every holiday at exactly the same time. Usually, at 4PM the day before the “holiday” that everyone know was coming, your entire client base calls to ask you how to change the Automated Attendant for a holiday greeting! One of the features that every ShoreTel System Administrator truly appreciates is a […]
ShoreTel has a family of new media gateways. The more interesting switches are referred to as SGV switches. There is an SG50V and an SG90V that differ only in the number of FXO and FXS ports that they support. What makes these switches (i.e. media gateways) so interesting is that they have a LINUX kernel […]
Installing a ShoreTel IPBX solution is a process not an event. I have previously published a book entitled “VoIP System Planning Guide” that can be download from the DrVoIP site. This guide covers the basics for planning and managing a VoIP deployment in general and a ShoreTel solution in particular. The “devil is in the […]
The ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center provides for “Skills Based Routing” an often confusing and misunderstood feature. It is important to note that this function might not achieve the desired result as it is only effective when there is more than one Agent available to accept a call. Lets take an obvious skill, like a Language […]
Configuring a ShoreTel ECC is better understood if we start from the Agent and work back to the caller. In the ShoreTel Enterpriser Contact Center we first define Agents whom we then assign to Groups which are generally the “destination” of a Services. Services are reached through entry points referred to as an IRN or […]
The genius mathematician and founder of the area we know as Cybernetics, Norbert Wiener coined the phrase “the human use of human beings”. Writing post WW2, his frame of reference was societies growing concern with automation. The concept should now be understood as “using computers to free humans for more productive work”. So when we […]
The key word in wireless is “mobility”. Broadband wire line, WiFi, WiMax and even dial-up are technology enablers that provide a solutions for the increasing need to be “connected”. There are issues with each one: broadband service can be expensive, depending on the provider, and it certainly isn’t available in many rural areas; WiFi has […]
Lets take a look at the impact of SIP – Aide from the pure technology play, SIP represents a fundamental change in the economics of the telecommunications market. The carriage of telecommunications has been in transition with a steady migration for distance sensitive to usage sensitive pricing. Historically there where three components of the cost […]
From time to time a new technology comes along that causes a dramatic paradigm shift with significant economic impact. As it relates to the customer premise telecommunications world, there are a number of trends that have the potential of dramatically altering the telecom equipment market place. Many industry executives have witnessed the switching equipment transition […]
Though I know we have readers out there who have never seen a rotary dial telephone (or a 33 RPM record), many readers will be familiar with “star codes”. Star Codes have been generally well known to most phone users since the inception of DTMF dialing. Who has not done the old *82 to block […]
Sometimes there is nothing like a telephone lines mans test set to hear exactly what is going on! VoIP solutions have a double challenge: First it is hard to put a butt set on an IP connection; and secondly what happens when that connection hits a gateway at a remote site? This is always a […]
Encryption of VoIP traffic was, for some of us a humorous concept. I remembered as a young development professional how much fun it was to use a packet sniffer to capture the bosses packets and reassemble his email over the LAN. Years before that when I worked at the phone company as a central office […]