In the CISCO world, you can bring up a range of phones, auto-assign an extension number, have a fully functioning dial plan  and never define a user!  In a ShoreTel deployment you can auto-register a range of phones, but they can not participate in a dial plan until they are assigned or “owned” by a user.   In one solution, the privileges that a phone has, like being able to make International phone calls, is set by the privileges of the user.  In ShoreTel a user is associated with a user group and that group has privileges associated with it.

In the ShoreTel world,  users are licensed but phones are not directly licensed.  You clearly have to have ShoreGear resources for the phones to register in the system,  but aside from the cost of the phone and ShoreGear switches, the phone is not directly licensed.   If you deploy that phone in the “Parts”  department you will need to create a User and associate that User to the phone.    So we now need to create  a user and user name like “Parts Desk1″ and assign it to a phone.   Optionally, we could create a user named Tony Slavetore who works in the parts department, but that brings up the issue of of separating a “function” from a “person” which is an entire deployment discussion in itself and the subject of another blog.

In the CISCO world, you can have phones with extension numbers and they do not have to have a User profile associated with them.   In a CISCO deployment, phones belong to “partitions” and “calling search spaces” and that is what determines the phones privileges.    In fact the concept of a “partition” makes it possible to separate phones in such a way that “staff” for example, can not dial “executives”.   ( If asked in a ShoreTel system to restrict a phone from being able to dial a specific other phone, I would have to puzzle that one out ).   Again, this is not a which strategy is better discussion, but it is a distinct cultural difference that we seldom hear about.

The included video demonstrates adding a user and a phone in both the ShoreTel and the CISCO CUCM solution.  System Administrators will spend +80% of there time in this area!  Adding, deleting or modifying Users is a key part of the day to day maintenance of a phone system.

(Comments are closed only because of all the spam!  Comments are appreciated and published!  In fact, if you would like to write a guest blog, just open your membership portal and you will find a tab that allows this!).

Compare ShoretTel and CISCO Part 3 – Users and phones is a post from: DrVoIP Tech Blog

The club boasts 35,000 diehard members supported by 150 employees working from a CBD office and sites at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) and AAMI Park. A 10-year old POTS phone system was being used across three sites; it was unreliable and expensive to operate and maintain.

“Retaining the LG Nortel Aria phone system was simply nonviable,” noted Richard Arnott, IT Manager, Melbourne Football Club. “Users were unable to communicate within the same workspace or when in the field, which is critical to all organizations, not just a professional footy club. To add to the woes, the system kept crashing and lacked the basic reliability a phone system should possess.”

So, the club looked at various systems (including a Cisco offering) before deciding to say no to the status quo. They chose ShoreTel.

The ShoreTel offering stood out from competitors due to its ability to provide a unified approach to communications. It provided a simple to use, simple to maintain resource that was flexible enough to meet exacting requirements and accommodate individual needs.

“The ShoreTel rollout was fast, simple and effective. It was the ideal IT rollout,”
- Richard Arnott , IT Manager, Melbourne Football Club

On May 7, we announced TAC’s Call Me feature.

Call Me is a virtual queuing solution that provides the Service Request (SR) creator the option of having TAC call you back instead of waiting in queue – without losing your place in queue. This can be done at the time of SR creation via the portal or when placing subsequent follow-up calls for support. (This feature is currently available to our North America Partners. By July 1, we plan to make it available to everyone.)

Users have also been asking us for the ability to troubleshoot common issues without having to call into TAC.

We are thrilled to announce that the first round of TAC Troubleshooting Reference Guides (TRG) are now available! You can find them at: http://support.shoretel.com/kb/view.do?kcId=KB16648 (customer/partner login required).

Our objective is to share the most common issues we get calls for, and the techniques used to troubleshoot them. These first round of TRGs pertain to Contact Center, Communicator, SIP Trunks, and Server. These guides also include what info TAC will need when you call, so we can more quickly address your issue.

We take your feedback seriously and are committed to taking action to make ongoing service improvements. If you have any suggestions or comments, please send them to me at: bharath-feedback@shoretel.com.

Thanks!

Another company that has announced its intention to go public is Avaya. Avaya recently filed its calendar Q1 2012 quarterly financial report with the SEC and the results paint a vastly different picture than Facebook.

In its most recent quarter, Avaya had a sequential revenue decline of 9.4% and a year-over-year revenue decline of 9.6%. Furthermore, its net loss was $162 million compared to a loss of $26 million in the previous quarter and a loss of $432 million in the year ago quarter. Not exactly what investors are looking for.

In fact, Avaya was named to Fortune Magazine’s “20 Companies That Lost the Most” list in 2012 and “20 Biggest Money Losers” list in 2011.

With Avaya’s over $6 billion (yes, billion with a “B”) in debt, it’s no wonder that they’ve had to continually restructure their operations. In fact, Avaya has had a restructuring program in fiscal 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012 (source: Avaya 10-Q pages 11-13).

We know all too well the risks to Avaya customers of having too much debt as evidenced by what happened to Nortel and Nortel customers. Avaya even highlights this risk in their annual 10K filing (Avaya 10K, December 2011, page 30):

“Our degree of leverage could adversely affect our ability to raise additional capital to fund our operations, limit our ability to react to changes in the economy or our industry, expose us to interest rate risk to the extent of our variable rate debt and prevent us from meeting obligations on our indebtedness.”

Perhaps a telling sign is that Avaya’s debt is rated “B3” (junk, non-investment grade) by Moody’s and “B-“ (junk, non-investment grade) by Standard & Poor’s (source: Avaya 10-Q page 60). These debt ratings are actually lower than what Nortel debt was rated 4 months before Nortel declared bankruptcy.

Whether or not Avaya will be able to go public depends on investor appetite. Those investors who do their homework may come to realize that they are not that hungry.

Avaya’s latest SEC filing can be found at: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1116521/000119312512232956/d338618d10q.htm

This reliability can be augmented by provisioning two methods of backup voice switches:

Inter-Site

This solution is ideally suited for distributed systems comprised of a larger HQ location and any a number of branch locations. Dedicated spare IP phone resources can be provisioned at the HQ location to serve the entire system i.e. any voice switch failure at a branch location will result the branch IP phones switching over and receiving service from the HQ voice switches.

This is extremely cost effective and leverages the statistical likelihood that only one branch will have a local voice switch outage at a given time.

Intra-Site (aka: N+1)

IP failover within a site is a second option of course. This might be considered for the HQ location itself or for larger semi-autonomous branch locations. This option requires spare voice switch at the location itself. What distinguishes the ShoreTel solution again is the efficiency with which the spare capacity can be provisioned.

Let’s take an example of 180 IP phones at such a location. A nominal implementation might be to deploy two voice switches capable of supporting 90 phones each. However by deploying 3 voice switches with spare capacity a more optimal backup scenario can be created: the three voice switches each nominally serve 60 phones (i.e. they each have spare capacity of 30 phones).

A failure in any of one of the three voice switches will result in the affected phones seamlessly moving over to the spare capacity on the other two voice switches. So the cost of providing backup services is 50% or less over the nominal cost of the required resources compared to 100% for more conventional redundant solutions from other vendors.

It is even possible to combine these two options and this allows ShoreTel to deliver an extremely robust UC platform.

We had the vision of inspiring our partners to create and execute joint marketing activities with ShoreTel, and this is exactly what we designed these classes to do.

At ShoreTel, we have always held the opinion that customer retention, growth and satisfaction stem from a thriving and successful partner ecosystem. To achieve this, we decided to initiate a series of events, which would educate channel marketing professionals with the very latest industry ideas, concepts and practises. As a first step, we hired marketing specialists Bowan Arrow to design one day sessions which would provoke discussions, debates and actions. We wanted these sessions to originate individual marketing plans, into which fulfilment ShoreTel would invest.

Each one of our channel partners brings specific expertise, whether it is vertical understanding, or horizontal technical expertise, to the customers that they serve. What we wanted to do with the Accelerate programme, was to grow their businesses by providing the tools and education needed for them differentiate and make themselves heard in the competitive, noisy market of unified communication solutions.

As of today, we have over 30 joint marketing campaigns agreed and underway in the UK channel as a direct result of the Accelerate Marketing Knowledge series; some backed with 100% funding from ShoreTel.

The next Accelerate Marketing event will be held in the autumn, when attending partners will report on their successful campaigns and share best practice with the community.  We also plan to reward the most proactive partner marketer with personal incentives, as well as recognise the businesses that have been commercial successful through joint initiatives with ShoreTel.

From the outset we viewed the Accelerate marketing Knowledge project as a long term investment that encouraged personal development, as well as commercial success. The feedback we gather from the sessions is overwhelmingly positive and the attendance numbers reflect how much value our partners get from this training.

All telephone systems have to deal with the same key architectural  issues regardless of who manufactured the equipment.   All phone systems have to provide for the definition of a system “dial plan”; trunk groups, call flow options, phone devices, gateways and user profiles.   The dial plan, for example,  not only has to identify the patterns used to route callers between system extensions, but as is often the case in a VoIP deployment, between geographically distributed corporate locations or “sites”.    The dial plan identifies the legitimate patters that define system end points and also include system extensions.  System extension define various facilities and features with in the system.  The Automated Attendant, for example, has a system extension number that can not be used by another extension in the system.  Likewise so does the conference bridge, park feature, hunt groups and paging groups.

The phone system defines Trunk Groups which in turn contain individual telephone lines.  Permissions are defined within the system to enable access to these different trunk groups and also define what other facilities a user might  have access to.  Devices are defined within the system, typically consisting of phone instrumentation, media gateways to the PSTN or Remote Sites and collaboration facilities like conferencing and presence.  Other application servers are also defined in the system to provide for advanced functionality like Contact Center.

The entire subject of User configuration is contained within the system database as both a comparatively static form as well as a run time representation.    A user name and extension number, is an example of a relatively static configuration data parameter.   Which mode or state that users is in, would be an example of a “run time” state.   Which phone the user is currently assigned, where do their voice message reside and what restrictions have been placed on them are all examples of administrative options that need to be configured.
Both ShoreTel and CISCO have developed Web based interfaces to enable system administration.  ShoreTel argues a single “brilliantly simple”  portal to all system configuration facilities.  CISCO argues a level of control over configuration details that enable laser like configuration options.   For example ShoreTel operates on the concept of canonical dialing.  If a user dials 123-4567  ShoreTel will translate that into +1 (123) 456-7890.   CISCO anticipates  “dial-patterns” that make it possible to strip +1 (123) 456-7889 out from +1 (123) 456-7890 and route it differently.   The System Administration portal is the interface that is used to configure, define and revise all system options and for this reason it is as important as the phone set itself!

Over the next few blogs we will look at the actual web portal interface of both of these solutions.  In this first video, we will go over the portal interface in general, comparing both systems.  In subsequent blogs on this subject we will compare different administrative activities such as adding users, phones, gateways, sites and configuring call flows including automated attendants and hunt groups.

Compare ShoreTel & CISCO Part 2 – System Admin Portal is a post from: DrVoIP Tech Blog

The customer wanted their Contact Center agents to know whether calls were in queue or not. They wanted them to really know…with a lighted beacon installed in their call center. When calls were in queue the beacon should flash continuously.

Alert beacons are common in call centers and, using a simple electronic device known as a ring detector, a phone call can be made to trigger all kinds of lamps, horns, door openers, etc. (Non-endorsed example: http://www.vikingelectronics.com/products/view_product.php?pid=169)

ShoreTel’s Contact Center provides a Real-Time Group Activity event feed, which can broadcast events, including the number of calls in queue for each Contact Center group. Professional Services developers created a Windows service that subscribes to the event feed, and when calls are in specific queues, call out to a pre-configured telephone number, continuously until calls are no longer in the queue. The customer simply connects the target analog telephone to their ring detector device controlling the beacon. The beacon signals when calls are in queue, and goes dark when the queue is idle.

Each Contact Center group can be configured to be associated to a different target phone number so multiple alert devices could be used, one for each group, perhaps with different color beacons.

To explore enhanced and custom applications like this one, contact ShoreTel Professional Services at ProfessionalServices@shoretel.com or +1 800-425-9385 x3331.

For companies like the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory, that means a huge spike in seasonal orders. The National Retail Federation says that Mother’s Day is the second leading gift-giving holiday with consumers expected to spend more than $14B.

To handle the Mother’s Day rush, Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory leverages ShoreTel unified communications solutions.

Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory is an international franchisor, confectionery manufacturer and retail operator with hundreds of stores in the United States, Canada and the United Arab Emirates. From its 53,000 square foot factory in Durango, Colo, the company manufactures an extensive line of premium chocolate candies and other confectionery products to supply its many franchise locations, delivered fresh by its fleet of refrigerated trucks.

In 2011 they realized they needed to make some changes to their older phone system. Their old phone system was obsolete and becoming more unreliable, resulting in system down time. They reviewed many VoIP products and chose ShoreTel based on the ShoreTel demo and their long-standing relationship with their partner – Real Time Networks.

They purchased ShoreTel phones and workgroups, which helps their customer service group take catalog orders, assist with online orders, and place orders for their franchise stores calling in to replenish inventory items.

The benefits have included improved reliability, easier conferencing capabilities, partner support and cost savings from canceling their legacy maintenance agreement.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the mom’s out there. May you all get something sweet this year.

Having deployed literally thousands of phone systems of all sizes and levels of complexity, we have distilled a set of rules and check lists that work.   (see our “network readiness check list” and our “VoIP planning guide”) When phone systems were analog or traditional TDM based solutions,  deployments were challenging enough!  You always had the User group, Call flow and “K plans” to hammer out along with the usual Telephone carrier challenges.  With VoIP solutions however, the level of complexity has dramatically increased.  This technology touches so many other infrastructure domains that it is becoming increasing more difficult to draw a box around what is included in the project!   Consider that you are required to  integrate a phone system with Active Directory,  Exchange, CRM applications and deploy over a geographical topology that might be global in scope!  You need a road map for success and  project management becomes an essential component of a successful deployment.

The first post sale step should be to organize a “kick off” meeting.  The kick off meeting  is an opportunity to set expectations and establish guidelines that will help complete the project on time and within budget. When you leave the kickoff meeting, everyone on the project team must be on the same page.  It is imperative that we identify the key “stake holders” in this project.  Minimally this list has to include an Executive sponsor, the Account manager and the Project manager.    During this meeting you will want to spell out goals, objectives and deliverable identities then obtain “buy in” from the kick off team.   You will introduce the project team members and identify their individual “roles and responsibilities”.   Setting a target for “go live” often helps drive the milestones that have to been executed if that time line is to be achieved, so I am a big proponent of working backwards from a target date!   Developing a contact list should be accomplished at this meeting and if the project will use a web portal for communicating, it should be demonstrated.   Allow for the possibly that there may be outside vendors that need to be identified at this time and added to the contact list.  Finally, assign “home work” and set due dates for the next meeting.

The kick off meeting is almost a social event and is a time for people to associate names and faces.   It is not a working session, but an effort to set expectations for all that will be either on the project implementation team or will be impacted by the implementation process.   There is a wide range of personalities and skill sets at a “kick off meeting” so it is important to adopt a language that is comfortable for all.  The team will consist of very technical people, financial  professionals and technology consumers (We are trying to avoid using the work “users”.  There are only two industries that call customers users.  The IT community and the drug trade).   It has been my experience that we will almost always get all of the technical stuff settled; all the speed and feeds, bits and bytes.   The area that is always the most difficult to extract is the Call Flow information .  For this reason it is imperative that the team have a representative that can speak for the User group.   Someone has to define a callers experience and the scripts that are head by the caller as they progress through the telephone system (see also: http://www.blog.drvoip.com/call-flow-the-callers-experience-when-reaching-your-business ).

Some of the internal players that will need to be included on the implementation team are responsible for key infrastructure components.   Active Directory integration is now almost always a part of a VoIP deployment.   Messing with a companies domain and user authentication polices are never take lightly and you will need to get key intellectual resources involved to pull this off successfully.   Clearly, the computer network both LAN and WAN will touch the the new phone system and this area requires even more planning and communication.  Generally, there will be outside vendors involved especially as it relates to the WAN connectivity.   Getting the carrier to the table early on in the process will greatly facilitate the success of the project.

Facilities management or property management and the bag full of deal killing goodies needs to be addressed early on!  If you are deploying in a “greenfield” you will have a different set of challenges then if you are replacing an existing phone system.   Often a “greenfield” is another word for “new construction” and construction always means scheduling conflicts and delay.  This is where your project management software really gets exercised!

The actual deployment of equipment is almost reduced to a task list. Properly managed most of the heavy lifting has already been accomplished before the equipment is actually installed.   The network has been assessed, made ready, routes updated and QOS applied.   The user database, IVR scripts, trunk facilities, Extension lists, Hunt groups and system definition have already been programmed.   We are down to “rack and stack” and set placement in anticipation of exercising our detailed system test and acceptance process.

It is about this time that we will want to have the Training team make an appearance.    Generally, it is best to schedule user training as close to the “go live” dat as possible.  We have found that we can brake user training into two groups.  The first group is a an abbreviated session design to assure that all can answer an incoming call, park, transfer and conference.  If users can do that by “go live”  only good things can happen.    The second group is an extended session augmented by multimedia and other online solutions.  This training is for your power users and special users like Operators, Agents and Supervisors.  Actually, this is a process not an event and your training program has to be ongoing over the life of the deployment.   People come and go in any company.  Your reputation and phone system stay. Make sure new users have a good impression!

The “go live” is also more of a process than an event.   Moving the old numbers to the new phone system, might be a single task in time, but it is part of a process that includes a series of collateral events.  For example, how do we get our Voice Mail off the old system?   In fact, what happens to the old system?   Was Garbage removal in the project plan?   A new VoIP deployment needs a “post cut” support plan that includes establishing a “help desk” and identifying a problem reporting process and resolution team.

If there is a “kick off” meeting there should also be a project close and review meeting.    This is where we can review what happen and how to transition the project to a support mode.   There should be an “as built” documentation package that is handed off from the project team to the operations team.  These documents will be outdated in less than a month, but it makes ongoing support viable if we have a record of changes to date, so make the extra effort to get this package completed as part of your project plan.   Ultimately you will want to have a 30 day review.   Keeping a client takes as much effort as getting a new client, so make ongoing client contact and system optimization part of your service offering.   Include ongoing training and you should be able to keep a client for life!

Deploying ShoreTel – A project managers notes! is a post from: DrVoIP Tech Blog