On more than one occasion I have actually had to telnet into a clients router or switch using nothing more than a mobile phone!  Now, that is either an example of superior customer service or an indication of creeping insanity.   When you have to, you have to!   Sometime ago I moved to an Iphone and that actually makes RDP, VNC  or Telnet actually usable on a mobile phone in a pinch. To say I think the Ipad is [...]

Recently a client discoverd that at terminated employee, gone for almost a month, was still answering his office extension from his cell phone!  We have so many technology options for mobility today that the HR deparment most be going nuts trying to keep the “exit interview” check list up to date!   Without commenting on the HR ramifications, IT system administrators have long had to contend with terminated employees and how to handle remote access, email and the other regular [...]

Setting up QOS on your routers to support ShoreTel VoIP across a WAN connection requires that you employ some creativity in your configuration.   Think of Class Marking as a way of “coloring” packets so that the routers no how to treat the packets when there is any kind of congestion.   We want voice packets to have a priority over data packets, so we color them and tell the carrier or WAN router which color is voice.   Generally, QOS strategies employ [...]

It really doesn’t matter what VoIP system you installed they all generally have one architectural characteristic in common; the configuration database.  Depending on the system, you might find a database engine that ranges in complexity from an Access Database to a full blown SQL database.  The database will store configuration information, status information and often, call detail records that document phone system activities.   The characteristic of the database that is consistent across all architectures is the fact that there can [...]

Historically, there were three services in the ShoreTel architecture that were no distributed to other servers.   To over simplify, this meant that if the HQ server (read primary server) was unavailable, the services that were not distributed would not function.  The three services were Route Points, Account Codes and Workgroups.   For example, if a user group was set to “forced” account code verification and the server was unavailable, that service would fail and the effected user would not be able [...]

One of the benefits of a successful blog, is the talented people you meet and the ideas that you exchange with other industry professionals. Through an earlier blog on the subject of connecting an Apple Iphone to a ShoreTel System as a SiP extension, I met such a creative talent: Matt Vlasach of Pacificswell! Matt was both an excited ShoreTel user and a Iphone aficionado. Thought Matt was happy to play with SIP his real interest was in creating a [...]

If you have been following our tech tips, you know that route points in the ShoreTel IPBX have a matching IRN in the Contact Center. If you want to route a call to a different destination based on the date and time that a call hits the Contact Center, how and where would you apply the schedule? Technicians familiar with the ease of creating schedules in the ShoreTel IPBX, might immediately apply a schedule to a route point. After all, [...]

Trouble Shooting VoIP issues in a multi-site deployment is a challenge to even the most talented network engineer. It is often difficult to determine what is a voice equipment issue and what is an issue aggravated by a network conditions. As network engineer trouble shooting an issue, having access to network monitoring tools is essential. Sometimes we have to use the basic ICMP tool sets and ping our way through a trace route, but network connectivity is only one element [...]

How many people hit the Auto Attendant and then dialed one for Sales? One of the most requested reports from ShoreTel clients is the analysis of Automated Attendant key strokes. With in the ShoreTel iPBX there are probably several ways to implement this, but we prefer the use of “route points” (see past blog). “ Thank you for calling our company during our normal business hours. For Sales Press 1, for Service Press 2 or stay on the line and [...]

To the sales team, I sound like a broken record as I repeated the engineering driven mantra: “A VoIP solution is only as good as the network it is build on”.     No matter how many times we tell clients that you can not obtain reliable, predictable toll quality voice communications over the public Internet, they insist on having us implement it.   The old marketing adage “you do not give customers what they need, you give them what they want” clearly [...]