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 built in to support a Compact Flash Card which enables localized Automated Attendant and Voice Mail. In the world of ShoreTel’s “single image solution” we [...]

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 test engineer, it was not uncommon to find an interesting phone call and plug it into the over head paging system to provide entertainment for [...]

Prior to version 7 of  ShoreTel, backing up your ShoreTel system was very straight forward. There was a single folder in the root directory named d:\ Shoreline data. This folder contained all the information that was required to completely restore your ShoreTel system from a bare metal server in the event of a major disaster. The folder contained the configuration database, which at the time was kept in Microsoft Access. It also contained all of your recorded prompts for Automated [...]

If you ask your average IT professional what a T span is, the usual response will be that it is a 1.5MB connection to the internet. Ask your average telecom tech what a T span is and you will be told it is 24 channels of dial tone! As a VoIP Engineer what a T span is and you should get the answer:, “what do you want it to be”? One of the great challenges of implementing a VoIP solution [...]

What exactly is the value of a Distributed Voice Mail Server (e.g. DVM)?   What are the pro’s and con’s of installing one?  Does it have any impact on resiliency (not redundancy) as it relates to business continuity in the event of server failures?  ShoreTel has a distributed architecture but like all other VoIP solutions there is only one “read/write” database and that is a component of the ShoreTel architecture aptly named the HQ server.   IF this server goes down and [...]

We have been actively working with VoIP since 1999!   Since 2001 we have installed well over 10,000 ShoreTel desktops and one characteristic of these VoIP environments has surfaced into high relief on the radar screen here in technical support:  A VoIP solution is only as good as the computer Network it runs on! Network Monitoring – a Necessary Evil?  When someone mentions network monitoring, most network administrators immediately start thinking: overpriced, large server requirements, difficult to install, time-consuming to configure. [...]

Configuring SIP extensions has become one of the most requested support questions we receive. Asterisk, CISCO and ShoreTel all support SIP extensions. Candidly, SIP is an excellent protocol and one that most IT professionals are already familiar with. This is an application level protocol and looks an awful lot like HTTP etc. Ever go to a webpage and get a 404 error, “page not available”? Well SIP error messages are very similar. If you get a 404 SIP error message, [...]

SIP trunks can be used for a wide variety of call processing  solutions, some of which are very cost effective as in Free!   We have used  SIP tunks to interconnect ShoreTel systems over the Internet, complete with four digit dialing between systems!    Most recently,  we have been able to create a ShoreTel compatible audio conference server at a fraction of the cost normally associated with these servers.   The most costly part of  this conference solution  was the [...]

Every business desktop seems to have some type of customer or ticket management software solution.  Outlook and Notes are very common personal contact managers, but other popular solutions include Salesforce, Goldmine, ACT, Microsoft CRM, Time Slips and the list goes on and on.    Having a “record” pop up on your desktop based on Caller ID is the most common integration request we see.    How about doing a reverse look up on an incoming phone call, to learn the [...]