“Historically”, excuse the pun, we always had a challenge with ShoreTel Contact Center Historical report! There were two issues. First, though you could schedule a report to be run automatically at a present time, you had to chose between printing to a file or printing to an actual print device. If you choose to print to a file, you could not set the path for any location other than that set by the default path of the ShoreTel Contact Center. [...]

An assumption in this blog  is that if your company has a  ”network administrator”  on staff, you have a network that is large enough to require constant  ”care and feeding”.    As such dumping a bunch of VoIP phones onto your network without VLAN’s  would never happen.  After all,  the fist job of a network administrator is to make the network broadcast space smaller and smaller.  That is why we subnet!   Take a typical Class C network with 100 [...]

As you can tell from our video library and blogs, we are very excited supporters of the ShoreTel Contact Center!  You can not find a more feature rich or cost effective  solution to call routing, email routing  and web collaboration!    To be fair, however,  ShoreTel has always been ahead of the curve with “call center” like  functionality.    Out of the box, the ShoreTel IPBX has an amazing set of features that can fit just perfectly in the small [...]

You can hardly install a Automated Attendant with out creating the Audio files!    If you have looked at any of our videos on setting up the ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center, you know that we urge you to create all of your audio files before you start setting up your Contact Center Services!   Making recordings should be easy enough, but ShoreTel wants to have the wav file in a specific format:  CCITT-mulaw, 8Khz, 8bit Mono.  This is easy enough [...]

When installing the ShoreTel PCM 9.1 call manager software on a PC that has been upgraded to Windows XP service pack 3, occasionally there is a Microsoft Installer error that prevents the ShoreTel software from being installed. The error is “Error 1720 – A script required for this install to complete could not be run”. The installation will then fail requiring the issue to be corrected and the installer to be ran again. This is caused by an issue with [...]

When installing a Shoregear switch, one of the parameters that you enable is to indicate which server is to manage this switch!    Normally this is no big deal, but with the V switch, you need to pay attention to this parameter as it will impact your Automated Attendant and Hunt Groups. Let us assume we have a V switch installed in Dallas, Texas which is in the CST zone.    If this switch is managed by a server in [...]

With all the talk about “health care” you would expect growing demand for  more application integration for this particular industry vertical!  The ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center can process “dial lists” that enable the system  to make outbound phone calls.   The “dial list” typically gets a list of phone numbers from a MySQL database that can be populated by some other application, like scheduling software.   It would not be out of the realm of possibility for the ShoreTel ECC [...]

In this economy there are a growing number of mergers and acquisitions, or “marriage by shot gun”. When companies combine they have the challenge of integrating their data and telecommunications systems. For example, we have witnessed an increased demand in companies seeking technical assistance in merging ShoreTel systems. There are two basic options for doing this and the choice often depends on resource requirements and “dial plan” conflicts. To illustrate these options let’s assume Company A merges with Company B. [...]

I would like to kill  call center challenges with one blog!   In many call center environments, it is possible that an agent has a Direct in Dial (e.g. DID) number that a client might call and by pass the entire call center process!   For a call center manager, this is very frustrating!  Your create a Contact Center to organize the flow of calls to your Technical Assistance Center, and clients by pass the process by calling your Agents/technicians [...]

This is a follow up post to an earlier post on LLDP-MED. VoIP phones on the market today follow the same basic boot and operations process: 1 – Wait for an LLDP packet from the Ethernet switch 2- Send a DHCP discovery packet to find the DHCP Server 3- Send a DHCP request to the DHCP server to get an IP address 4- Send an LLDP-MED packet to the Ethernet switch 5- Wait for an LLDP-MED packet from the Ethernet [...]