Tom Hamilton, senior director of channel marketing, has been named one of CRN’s 2012 Channel Chiefs.

This prestigious list of the most influential and powerful leaders in the IT channel recognizes those executives directly responsible for driving channel sales and growth within their organization, while evangelizing and defending the importance of the channel throughout the entire IT Industry.

Highlights of the ShoreTel channel program over the past year include:

• Increased investment in lead generation and distribution across U.S. and several verticals including government, professional and banking sectors.
• Migration of lead management to Salesforce.com, making opportunity registration and management easier.
• Continued development of turnkey marketing and demand generation toolkits.
• Re-vamp of individual partner dashboards, providing comprehensive details on partner sales, customer satisfaction, TAC usage and investment in ShoreTel training/resources.
  • Introduction of new Learning Management System on-line course delivery, enabling partners to have more choices in maintaining their sales and technical knowledge investments.

For the ninth consecutive year, Channel Chiefs were selected by the CRN editorial team based on channel experience, program innovations, channel-driven revenue, and public support for the importance of IT Channel Sales.

Selected by CRN’s editorial staff, the 2012 Channel Chiefs list is featured in the February issue of CRN Magazine and will be featured online at www.crn.com.

“The 2012 Channel Chiefs list recognizes vendor executives dedicated to driving channel programs in the IT marketplace. Our annual Channel Chiefs issue is a must-read for IT solution providers evaluating new vendors or looking to expand solution offerings. These are the people, the products and the programs that any savvy solution provider needs to know. We congratulate this year’s Channel Chiefs for their stellar record of business innovation applaud them for their continued dedication to the partner community.”
- Kelley Damore, VP, Editorial Director, UBM Channel.

Labels: Awards, Channel Partners

Article source: http://blog.shoretel.com/2012/02/shoretels-tom-hamilton-recognized-as-one-of-crns-2012-channel-chiefs/

As the BYOD (bring-your-own-device) phenomenon for mobile devices gains momentum, Dual Persona, the ability to maintain separate identities on a single device, is also rising in popularity.

With ShoreTel Mobility, I not only get access to all the rich deskphone and UC capabilities on my favorite smartphone, but also the ability to keep my business and personal profiles separate. My business contacts see my desk phone number as the calls route through the enterprise, while my personal contacts see the cell phone number.

Here’s a quick look at how easy it is to keep my personal calls separate from business on my Android.

Labels: Enterprise Mobility

Article source: http://blog.shoretel.com/2012/02/dual-persona-for-your-smartphones/

I recently had the opportunity to attend IT Expo in Miami Beach, Fl. This three-day seminar set out to provide in-depth information on UC apps – including SIP trunking, realtime video, Fax-over-IP, mobility and more.

My participation in panel discussions hosted by Ingate confirmed my belief that a focused security policy around UC is very important to all businesses. Daily reports of hacking and intrusions on the data side of the house no longer even get our attention, and with the rising prominence of SIP trunking as a new attack domain, this is topic that has to be taken seriously. 

Unfortunately the true facts are often covered or downplayed as a hacking incident can have really bad PR consequences for the target company or the equipment vendor through which the breach was accomplished.

One audience member gave an example that within a week of deploying SIP trunks with only a basic “SIP –aware” firewall they had seen their system compromised and costs of several thousand dollars had been run up.

Deploying SIP trunks with an enterprise Session Border Controller (like Ingate’s SIParator), as is common practice with ShoreTel systems, is a key component of a comprehensive UC system security plan.

Labels: Event, IP Phone Systems

Article source: http://blog.shoretel.com/2012/02/sip-trunking-at-it-expo/

The beauty and power of architecturally open systems is in the way they allow technologies to be combined, resulting in wholes much greater than the sums of their parts.

The ShoreTel Voice Forms IVR Application, a solution built via ShoreTel’s open software interfaces, allows callers to complete audio “forms” simply by speaking their answers one by one when prompted with questions. A resulting wave file contains their responses separated by “beep” delimiters and is delivered to designated ShoreTel voicemail boxes.   

ShoreTel customers such as South Shore Medical Center in Massachusetts designed their prescription refill process around this application. Patients call in their refill orders 24 hours a day and Medical Center administrators subsequently process these orders offline and very efficiently.

Taking technology combining a step further, bring in ShoreTel Innovation Network alliance member Mutare and their voice-to-text software. Mutare’s software can be used to translate voice form messages into text files that, in turn, can be processed to automatically create printed mailings, emails, or other written responses to requests – all without involving a single manual step!

Imagine the advantages of such a solution for a city visitors’ bureau that fields a large volume of phone requests for information every day. Automating responses to routine requests ensures that valuable human resources are applied to tasks not as easily handled by machines.

Since operational efficiency is paramount today’s competitive economy, most businesses cannot afford to *not* use technology to its best advantage and open systems make creative solutions possible.

Labels: Innovation Network, Professional Services

Article source: http://blog.shoretel.com/2012/02/wholes-greater-than-the-sums-of-their-parts/

I joined ShoreTel as managing director, EMEA, this past October, and was invited to meet the board in Sunnyvale, California. Playing it safe, I dressed-up but was surprised to discover a relaxed group of senior executives. A “compliment” about my tie broke the ice and set me thinking about the parallel between Silicon Valley and ShoreTel.

Famed for its technology start-ups, Silicon Valley has a well-established reputation for a no-nonsense way of doing business and lack of corporate baggage, which is similar to ShoreTel’s all-in-one telephony solution that is purpose-built from the ground up for IP. The complexity that plague customers of competitive systems with their various legacy or bolted-together technology, which are inherently complex, are entirely absent from ShoreTel’s Unified Communication solution.

It wasn’t a surprise when an Aberdeen Group study declared ShoreTel’s Unified Communication solution as the easiest to use and the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) in the industry. The unique, open distributed architecture of ShoreTel’s solution integrates seamlessly with existing business applications and processes. Enterprises can scale with ease by simply plugging in an additional switch – without the need to rip and replace infrastructure.

Going a step further, ShoreTel has put its money where it counts most by instituting a lowest TCO guarantee program. If a TCO analysis shows that ShoreTel’s TCO is higher than a competitor’s, it will lower its prices to beat the competition, regardless of the competitor’s price.

ShoreTel operates in an intensely competitive market, batting against highly entrenched players. But by offering brilliantly simple Unified Communication (UC) solutions and by putting the needs of customers ahead of everything, it has disrupted the market. Last year, we grew our customer base to 20,500, and continue to make inroads with enterprise customers.

Since joining ShoreTel in the autumn, I have been on the road mostly – meeting key executives, understanding the concerns of our partners and distributors. One thing that stands out most is the enthusiasm partners, customers, media have for ShoreTel. It is a company that has potential for significant growth and I’m very excited to be at the helm of the EMEA region, helping it expand further.

Labels: EMEA, Market Perspective, Unified Communications

Article source: http://blog.shoretel.com/2012/02/understanding-shoretel/

Cookie season is here!

The Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. is the largest voluntary organization of girls in the world – with a mission to build courage, confidence, and character and make the world a better place. The Girl Scouts of Northern California council includes over 47,000 girls and 32,000 adults.

The Girl Scouts of Northern California council was formed by a merger of five companies. The result was five different phone systems – most of them very old systems – that caused training and support challenges, not to mention the lack of integration. They evaluated many different phone systems and chose a ShoreTel solution, which included phones, ShoreTel Conferencing, ShoreTel VPN concentrator and plan to rollout ShoreTel Mobility.

They have seen many benefits, including:

• Saving money by leveraging ShoreTel conferencing and not having to use an external conference service.
• Ability for staff to stay more connected using ShoreTel features like extension assignment and call forwarding.
• Improved customer service by redesigning many business processes to allow customers to reach the groups they need and to answer all other incoming calls with a live person.
• Voice to text translations to a few mailboxes so they can respond quicker and with the right resource to help customers.

“Probably the biggest benefit we’ve seen is that we now have one system to support the entire company. This has unified our offices and helped our staff stay more connected.”
– Glenn Rogers, CIO, Girl Scouts of Northern California

For many of us we might be familiar with Girl Scouts because of their delicious cookies. Learn more about their 2012 cookie sale. Me – I’m partial to the Thin Mints.

Labels: Customer Experiences, Enterprise Mobility, VoIP Phone Systems

Article source: http://blog.shoretel.com/2012/02/girl-scouts-of-northern-california-unites-thanks-to-shoretel-solutions/

Well then, what about, keeping the ShoreTel PRI but bringing the dial tone in over a SIP trunk?

The fact of the matter is, that many carriers do bring the PRI circuit in over a SIP trunk!   They then run the circuit through a Integrated Access Device (e.g. IAD) that converts the SIP trunk to PRI and the resulting hand off to the ShoreTel is a traditional TDM flavor of PRI.   This makes the carrier happy and the ShoreTel PRI continues to operate with no feature depreciation as everything from a ShoreTel perspective remains TDM!   The original investment in ShoreTel equipment is protected and you get some of the benefits of having a SIP trunk  like foreign DID’s and more fail over options.

This got  us wondering if we could do the same configuration by rolling our own?  We came up with two solutions.

First we created our own SIP Appliance using a low cost Linux box running CentOS and our favorite Asterisk dis tro, both of which are available as freeware.  For the SIP to PRI configuration we added a Digium T1 card bringing our total hardware cost to less than $900 for both the PRI hardware and the Linux computer!   Next we setup a  simple T1 Tie line between the ShoreTel iPBX and the SIP appliance.   We then created an IAX trunk to our SIP provider from the WAN side of the SIP appliance,  assigned our DID’s to the SIP dial peer and we were up an running in no time!  The configuration is a classic B2BUA and it works just like the carrier provided CISCO or Adtran IAD!

Next we set out to build a SIP solution that was a pure dial peer with no TDM hardware at all!    Lets assume you have a remote branch office and you would like to provide a local DID for that branch.   Using a SIP DID and less than $500 dollars worth of Linux computer hardware ( see our blog on the Shiva plug) you can easily make this happen.   We used the same appliance we created for the PRI conversion, this time without the Digium T1 card.   We specified the remote SG50 as the IP trunk source and terminated it on the SIP Appliance.  Again we created a SIP dial peer from the Appliance to the SIP dial tone provider and assigned our DID numbers.  It worked flawlessly as a simple, end point SIP dial tone solution providing local DID numbers to that remote branch office.

One of the challenges of ShoreTel is that the entire architecture needs to be described, from an IP topology, inside a private address space.   That is why you can’t just interconnect a ShoreTel SIP trunk group with an ISP.   When establishing your SIP Peer to your provider,  you are generally going to link with a public IP address.  Using our SIP appliance we were able to bring up a remote branch office with an end point that supported 4 SIP Peers and used a local DID for that branch.     (ShoreTel SIP trunks are licensed in packages of 5, while all SIP dial peers provide dual channels?) Again, the SIP trunks between the ShoreGear SG50 and the SIP appliance was created completely within the required private IP address space, yet the appliance interfaced with a public IP address to create the multichannel SIP dial peer.    The Asterisk configuration we created enabled us to configure on the LAN side of the firewall, yet specify a public IP address for the dial peer end point with no NAT issues to contend with.

At the end of the day, there are a variety of solutions for bringing SIP into your ShoreTel deployment!  Sometimes the best things in life are free!  We are no busy integrating the ViciDialer with ShoreTel to provide an enterprise class Outbound dialing solution for the contact center using freeware! More on this later……

Comments are closed.

Article source: http://www.blog.drvoip.com/shoretel-sip-trunks-using-freeware/

“You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”

Smart businesses invest in their voice network in order to achieve savings, improve efficiencies and boost customer satisfaction. If they don’t have a tool that allows the right people to measure, they may not gain all the management benefits they expect. A call accounting system is that tool.

Today, call accounting is much more than assigning a cost to a call record. It is an essential resource that helps a business improve its bottom line by better managing its voice network to:

• Reduce Costs
• Improve Productivity
• Increase Security

By “accounting” for each call and providing insightful management reports, a call accounting system helps a business manager learn what it doesn’t know about its voice network:

• Are customer service calls being processed efficiently?
• Are we spending money for facilities that are not being using?
• Is our network being hacked, abused or misused?

Modern call accounting allows you to listen to your business’ heartbeat – providing visibility into key calling trends, calling expenses, and possible security threats, to name a few benefits.

@Comm is a developer of feature-rich, easy-to-use Call Accounting and Workgroup Reporting solutions, leveraging its 30-year history of innovation, partner and customer support. Additionally, @Comm is a longstanding member of ShoreTel’s Innovation Network, initially validated in 2007 – the program’s inaugural year.

CommView, from @Comm Corporation is a simple-to-use, yet advanced, VoIP Call Accounting and Reporting solution. CommView elevates traditional call accounting reporting by adding ShoreTel Workgroup reporting and traffic analysis reports. CommView reports help users take control of their voice network, enabling them to monitor and manage Telecom expense by department, detect potential abuse, pinpoint fraud or call hacking, and manage employee productivity by department and function.

If you’re already a ShoreTel Reseller, don’t miss @Comm’s upcoming presentation on how call-reporting solutions can help ShoreTel Resellers – as part of the ShoreTel Innovation Network webinar series highlighting Alliance technology partners.

To learn more about ShoreTel and CommView from @Comm, visit the @Comm Innovation Network site.

Labels: Innovation Network

Article source: http://blog.shoretel.com/2012/02/insights-call-accounting-from-comm-corporation/

With the rise of social media and email many companies think that fax is no longer used within their business. It often comes as a surprise that companies still use fax for their most important documents and is an integral part of their business. Industries such as local government, medical, finance, legal or logistics know that email isn’t good enough when it comes to delivering or receiving important, time sensitive or legal documents.

Why Fax?

• Because fax is secure
• Because fax is legally binding
• Because faxing is an end-to-end delivery technology that email has yet to achieve

So how does fax fit into a brilliantly simple UC solution? Fax machines don’t have a central control point and are not integrated with the rest of the business so it’s difficult to audit the documents being sent and received. It’s also another group of assets that need to be tracked so many businesses are moving over to fax servers that address these issues and bring down operational cost.

At ShoreTel we have third-party compatibility for fax calling with a number of fax servers via the ShoreTel Innovation Network. These combined solutions mesh well with low TCO, allowing end users to see real and immediate cost savings.

In the U.K., AMS Limited is working on a number of joint opportunities for fax integration, taking advantage of the virtualization capabilities. As a market leading fax server in Europe, Rightfax can now connect with ShoreTel over SIP trunks and allow fax traffic to be sent and received over an IP network using T.38.

Labels: EMEA, Innovation Network

Article source: http://blog.shoretel.com/2012/02/in-the-age-of-social-media-you-think-fax-is-dead-think-again-2/

It might be 20 degrees below freezing outside in Toronto, but there was a lot of hot stuff being shown at the annual Know Your Alternatives conference.

ShoreTel is a top sponsor of this conference, which focuses on educating customers about the alternatives to their legacy PBXs, such as Nortel and Mitel PBXs that may not have the same level of support as in previous years.

Pej Roshan presented an educational session on how to migrate from legacy PBXs with PBX-agnostic mobility applications, such as ShoreTel Mobility which works with Nortel, Cisco, Mitel and other SIP supported systems. Harvey Cohen, of the Winnipeg Convention Center, who recently implemented the ShoreTel Mobility solution on their Mitel PBX, joined Pej in the discussion.

It was a pleasure visiting my hometown and hearing a ShoreTel customers describe how our solution helps him stay connected in his 100,000+ft2 complex. Harvey commented on how they don’t have any immediate plans to replace their Mitel, but having the ShoreTel Mobility work on any PBX they could change to in the future is the ideal approach.

I also was included on a panel discussion of Cool Technologies, where I demonstrated the dual persona capabilities of our mobility solutions. It’s like having two phones in one. I call one person and my personal caller ID appears; I call another and my ShoreTel Sunnyvale caller ID appears.

I placed a third call to ShoreTel customer Boston Pizza for takeout for the plane flight home. We were able to share a few glass of wine at the reception, and show our full range of new collaboration and mobility solutions in our booth. Android and iPhones are really popular in Canada – with the most popular devices supported by ShoreTel Mobility.

Cheers!

Labels: Enterprise Mobility, Event

Article source: http://blog.shoretel.com/2012/02/canadians-like-to-know-their-pbx-alternatives/