The ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center provides for “Skills Based Routing” an often confusing and misunderstood feature. It is important to note that this function might not achieve the desired result as it is only effective when there is more than one Agent available to accept a call. Lets take an obvious skill, like a Language requirement and assume that our call center needs both English and French speaking customer service representatives. We can assign a skill level to French, but [...]

Configuring a ShoreTel ECC is better understood if we start from the Agent and work back to the caller. In the ShoreTel Enterpriser Contact Center we first define Agents whom we then assign to Groups which are generally the “destination” of a Services. Services are reached through entry points referred to as an IRN or Internal Routing Numbers. The IRN is connected through the PBX via TAPI to the DNIS dialed by the caller. Services can also have Destinations of [...]

The genius mathematician and founder of the area we know as Cybernetics, Norbert Wiener coined the phrase “the human use of human beings”. Writing post WW2, his frame of reference was societies growing concern with automation. The concept should now be understood as “using computers to free humans for more productive work”. So when we encounter an automated attendant or “robot receptionist”, we should remember that the repetitive work of greeting, screening, routing, message retrieval and message acquisition are sometimes [...]

The key word in wireless is “mobility”. Broadband wire line, WiFi, WiMax and even dial-up are technology enablers that provide a solutions for the increasing need to be “connected”. There are issues with each one: broadband service can be expensive, depending on the provider, and it certainly isn’t available in many rural areas; WiFi has very limited range, again limiting coverage, and dial-up is simply slow and can’t come close to meeting requirements for today’s applications. WiMax has gone through [...]

Lets take a look at the impact of SIP – Aide from the pure technology play, SIP represents a fundamental change in the economics of the telecommunications market. The carriage of telecommunications has been in transition with a steady migration for distance sensitive to usage sensitive pricing. Historically there where three components of the cost of a telephone call: origination, interexchange (e.g. Inter-LATA) and termination. The US telecommunications market has been moving toward a consolidation of service providers. Local Exchange [...]

From time to time a new technology comes along that causes a dramatic paradigm shift with significant economic impact. As it relates to the customer premise telecommunications world, there are a number of trends that have the potential of dramatically altering the telecom equipment market place.   Many industry executives have witnessed the switching equipment transition from electro-mechanical technology to solid state and stored program control switching. Clearly the migration from circuit switch to packet switched technology is reaching Tsunami proportions. [...]

Though I know we have readers out there who have never seen a rotary dial telephone (or a 33 RPM record), many readers will be familiar with “star codes”. Star Codes have been generally well known to most phone users since the inception of DTMF dialing. Who has not done the old *82 to block caller ID. In the ShoreTel system, basically every feature has a star code making it possible to use a simple single line telephone set to [...]

Sometimes there is nothing like a telephone lines mans test set to hear exactly what is going on! VoIP solutions have a double challenge: First it is hard to put a butt set on an IP connection; and secondly what happens when that connection hits a gateway at a remote site? This is always a fun situation. ShoreTel has a “trunk test tool” that has some usability. You can actually bring up the test tool, and right click a particular [...]

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 [...]

At one point in the evolution of telecommunications features, least cost routing was so sophisticated a function that it required an external processor. In the early 80’s when most large multi site telephone system installations were based on point to point, private T1 tie-lines the need for cost effective routing between sites was in such demand that a stand alone company of scale was formed to meet that need. In San Antonio Texas, a company still in existence today but [...]