ShoreTel Recently announced the availability of Version 7 of the Enterprise Contact Center.  It is not secret that I am a big fan of this product, so I was anxious to see what the new version had to offer.    The product has a number of new features and capabilities that are both feature specific and impact the infrastructure of the product.    Anyone who has worked with the ShoreTel iPBX for any period of time will become instantly comfortable with the new ECC system administration interface.  It is now a browser based portal, very similar to the interface used for the iPBX administration.  In fact I would be willing to bet that the new ECC portal will become the standard for the ShoreTel product line and the iPBX  Shoreware Director will take on some of the characteristics of the new ECC 7  administration portal.

Another area in which the ECC has adopted the exiting iPBX  paradigm is in the area of licensing.   Early versions of the ECC required the installation of a hardware dongle on the server and each desktop that ran the Supervisor software.   Dongles are a pain for everyone and beginning with Version 6, ShoreTel began to migrate away from this requirement by eliminating the dongle requirement for Supervisors.  Previous versions of ECC required the installation of the USB Hasp on the server before installing the ECC application.  No dongle, not ECC!   With ECC 7, not only are the dongles not needed, you get the familiar 45 day grace period to run the ECC application and try all the features before you have to provide the license keys.   The server key locks to the MAC of the server, in a fashion similar to the iPBX key.   The ECC application also reads the BIOS serial number of the server for added software protection.

Other infrastructure changes include the support for Windows 2008 R2 64 Bit Servers.   The ECC will support Citrix and WTS clusters and most importantly, roaming profiles are now supported.     The system will now allow for 100 concurrent Supervisors and 1000 concurrent Agents, though you may define 2000 agents in the database configuration.   The application support 400 DNIS reports and historical data can now be kept for 24 months allowing for year over year trend analysis.

An exciting new feature is the addition of Personal Queues.   I am sure we have all had the experience of working with an “agent” on a particular customer service issue, maybe given a “home work “ assignment only to call back and have to start over with a new agent.   The concept of a “Personal Queue” makes it possible for inbound callers to reach specific agents, if you desire that option.  In this way, after completing the “home work” assignment, you can call back in and queue for the agent that originally handled your call in the first place.    Agents can move high priority calls to their personal queue with a simple mouse click.   Historically, if you wanted this option you had to configure a group and service for each agent that required a personal queue.  With Version 7, this process has been streamlined with the creation go a new entity that defines how the caller should be handled while in the personal queue.  A very powerful option and very useful in direct selling environments.

The familiar graphical scripting tools has not changed and scripts are generated using the established procedure.  The Diagnostic console has been upgraded and is more usable for trouble shooting at the System Administrator level.    I am particularly excited about the creation of a Lab SKU, something I would like to see ShoreTel do with the entire product line.  The Lab SKU makes it possible for you to purchase and run a small scale Contact Center along side your production environment.  In this way you can create new scripts,  strategies, call flows and of course, test new upgrades before putting them into your production environment!

What is new in ShoreTel Contact Center Version 7? is a post from: VOIP Tech Blog

Recently, we had to create an Automated Attendant on an Enterprise Contact Center. At first this seemed almost boring, but then we ran into an issue. You can use the MENU icon to create your Automated Attendant script, with a TRANFER icon to each destination selected by the caller. You can use the SCRIP icon to send the caller on to a script to collect information like the callers account number for a SQL database look up; but how do you send a caller to “service”? Now that was a more interesting challenge and I have to thank Chad Burnett for pointing out the use of what has become my favorite new ShoreTel ECC scripting icon: “the Change Profile” action. This icon is a powerful call profile manipulator and enables the Enterprise Contact Center configuration to explode with call processing options.

Using the Change Call Profile icon you can select various Call Profiles for manipulation. Each system contains a number of mandatory system level call profiles like ANI and Caller ID. You as a system designer can also create Call Profiles to meet the needs of your exacting design requirements. For example, you might add the Call Profile “Account Code” that you might use in a script that prompts the caller to enter digits that you will use to look up a record in a SQL database.

The Change Call Profile icon also allows you to select a previously defined SERVICE. The following video clip reviews how the iPBX and the ShoreTel ECC interconnect. It demonstrates the use of the Change Call Profile icon, by demonstrating the creation of a simple automated attendant!

ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center “Change Call Profile” icon is a post from: VOIP Tech Blog

The ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center, though primarily and inbound call processing solution, can be applied to do outbound campaign dialing.   In addition to the native SQL scripting tools,  the system  can integrate with a wide variety of applications through either OBDC, XML or “triggers” and we have had experience with each of these options.    There is a young man up in the bay area, Houston Neal,  who has been writing a bit about Health Care Applications and you might take a minute to check out his recent article on this subject:  Seven Great Applications for PBX systems in Medial Practice.

ECC Medical Applications is a post from: VOIP Tech Blog

 For those of you familiar with the ShoreTel Workgroup Call Manager will see an immediate resemblance between the new ShoreTel Integrated Tool Bar and the old workgroup toolbar.    Where it might have said Workgroup on the PCM, it now says Contact Center.   You can program tool bar options for “Wrap of Codes” and “Release with Codes”.   Under the Contact Center, supervisors get a range of options that include all of the individual components that make up the various ECC modules.   The only disadvantage that I can find at this time, is that with the standalone Agent Tool Bar, you are able to “write” to the status line of the Agent Tool Bar.  I have not yet been able to do that with the Integrated toolbar, but that is a small price to pay for having a single GUI to manage at the agent desktop.   Using the Agent toolbar alone also enable you to create an environment in which you can have a day shift and a night shift using the same telephone extension.   Changing the log in of a ShoreTel PCM is not a straight forward “user” type process and for that reason, you might elect not to use the integrated toolbar.   Otherwise, take a look, it is an amazing technology and a significant step forward for the product line.  As I said, “development is a process not an event”, so we should expect continue incremental improvements from the ShoreTel ECC team!

ShoreTel ECC Integrated Tool Bar is a post from: VOIP Tech Blog