The Personal or Professional Call Manager has long been a key element in the success of the ShoreTel solution. This desktop call control application enables you to easily manage your phone calls. “Point and Click” to take action, or “right click” on an active call to immediately list all of your options. (You will find that there is always more than one way to do things in the ShoreTel Call Manager). The Call Manager can be customized by the system [...]

Remember, you never get a second chance to make a first impression! How you handle an incoming telephone call will largely define your company to the calling public, scarefully consider what image you want to project. Some businesses feel strongly that all incoming calls should be answered during normal business hours by a live operator. Others believe that what an automated attendant lacks in up-front personality, it makes up for in promptness and routing efficiency. There are two characteristics that need to be understood [...]

I am always being asked to compare ShoreTel and CISCO in one or another area.    CISCO has a family of products that range from the UC500 through the CCME and on to the full blown Unified Communications Call Manager.    One way to compare these two systems is to look a the raw cost of equipment, generally the tip of the ice berg in a voice over IP deployment, but a useful starting point.    Lets assume an small configuration of 85 [...]

In an early April Blog entitled Add ShoreTel Extension Lists to your Automated Attendant we talked about limiting a callers ability to dial internal extensions. This is the same feature you might use to provide “tenant services” to a ShoreTel installation that was serving more than one company. In Version 9 of ShoreTel, you now have some additional new options that can be used very creatively. Lets assume you do not want to allow people to directly dial an extension [...]

ShoreTel Call Screening is now available in Version 9!   Earlier versions of ShoreTel had a “find me follow me” feature that worked well.   Someone could hit your voice mail greeting and be told to “Press One and the system will attempt to locate me”   You could have two locations and the ShoreTel would call the first location and if you did not answer, it would try the second location.   The system was smart enough to know that if you answered [...]

As noted in a previous post, there are reasons that you might want to consider using the standard Agent tool bar. The Standard Agent tool bar enables the manipulation of an call center contacts (voice, email and chat) with an unobtrusive GUI. The toolbar can be standardized for each agent or a supervisor can allow agents to create there own tool bars. There is a setup icon that enables the ability to add or remove icons associated with different contact [...]

The ShoreTel Contact Center or Enterprise Contact Center product development effort has and continues to be a “process” not an “event”.     That is what characterizes software development efforts in general.   You have to know where to draw the line and make a supportable release.     New features are always being added to any evolving product, but knowing when to package up what we have in the process, document it and be able to support it, is what characterizes a new release.    [...]

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 fully automagic Automated Attendant! The means it knows when it is a holiday and it changes the greeting automatically!  ShoreTel does a really great job [...]

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 [...]

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 details” however and though the process can be understood, the individual tasks required to complete the process generally prove there is no substitute for hands [...]