Call Center

Extension Mobility

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With Cisco Call Manager we can do something called extension mobility. it allows you to goto any phone in the office and log in with your phone extension. Our call center software Zeacom Smartconnect has always had problems with extension mobility. Once we use it the extension would not work with the software until the system was rebooted. We put a patch on the system last Tuesday that was supposed to fix the problem. Turns out that it didn’t. Some extensions work, and others do not. it is driving Kai and I crazy.

It turns out that Cisco uses the MAC address of the device you are logging into to track the profiles for extension mobility. That doesn’t work with how Zeacom does things. They like netbios. We have had issues with Smartconnect and netbios before when we wanted to put devices on networks other than the network where the smartconnect server resides. Zeacom is working on yet another patch to get the two system to gel and work together. I am still eagerly awaiting extension mobility. I have been waiting since September 2003. Granted EM will work with the cisco phones, but I just cannot use the call center software once I use it. it becomes a real pain in the ass.

Visio, Is There Anything It Can’t Do?

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Visio is a fantastic piece of software. I have been using ti to update the floor plan of my companies Kingston office. The architect gave me a CAD file of the office when we opened last year. I imported it into visio. Now I am going back and replacing desks and other furniture with Visio objects. I am then labeling all of the cable drops in the office. This way I can print out the file and have a reference of where all the network jacks are throughout the office. I did this for our NYC office when we moved in back in 2002. I haven’t had time to do it for Kingston until now. We are finding it more and more necessary to have this map so I am working on it this week. Visio still rocks, but I don’t see that much of a difference between Visio 2000, 2002, & 2003. I am currently using Visio 2002 standard and it just isn’t that different from Visio 2000.

The Magix Is Dead!

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For the first 2 and a half years of its life, my company has used a Merlin Magix phone system to run our call center. It is an ok little phone switch. It was never designed to run a call center, but the price was right when we got it.

As of last monday we finally stopped using the Magix. We transfered our last 800# to our new call center in Kingston NY. After a week of verifying that everything is good, Keith and I finally shut off the old system today. We unplugged all the ports, and pulled the old thing off the wall. Our computer room looks much neater without it.

Now we need to see how much we can get for it and 50 or so phones.

Friday, Kingston Trip

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Friday I went to kingston for the day. Most of the trip was uneventful. That is good when traveling. I worked on the Group Policy Objects with Kai. I think we ironed out the kinks in what we want to do. For some reason our old profile we made would crash when we modified the security settings, but the new one I just created didn’t. Of course there is no major difference between the two. Go figure.

The trip home wasn’t that good. It took an extra hour or so to get home. Not sure why. the train was late. They said it was due to engine problems. Then we went slow and stopped allot along the way. I tried to sleep a bit on the train. I never do that so it was different for me. I used all my laptop battery power during the day and forgot to charge it. That wouldn’t be a problem if I sat on a window seat with a power outlet, but I sat on the aisle and couldn’t use it. The van wilder dvd I have been meaning to see will have to wait.

People on the train pissed me off. Like 4 people around me were either talking on their cell phones the whole time or one guy was playing a game on his phone with the stupid sounds turned on the whole time. People need to learn some etiquette.

Back From Kingston Again

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I am on the train back from Kingston, again. I went up for 2 days since we are short handed on the support side up there. I spent most of today interviewing people for a help-desk position. Yesterday was taken up by miscellaneous issues. I always try to bring up work from NYC when I goto kingston. And every time I do, I end up getting none of it done. This trip was no different.

The work keeps piling up. I hope to clean out my backlog tomorrow, if possible.

On the plus side, the posts from today were written on my new Powerbook on the train. I can once again blog while in transit!!!

Went To Kingston

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Took the day and went up to kingston to work. I got allot done. I also learned allot about what goes on day to day up there, and what the employee’s need from a support perspective. The weather was on my side and I was able to be home by 7:30PM.

VOIP Rocks

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I tested our VOIP link between offices today. I was able to get 12 or so people on the phones in our NYC office connecting through a VPN tunnel to our call manager in our Kingston office. I only had 1 complaint about quality. I need to do a test like that a few more times, but the results look promising.

Keith was out sick today, so I was busy with helpdesk issues. I also have to continue to evaluate our monitoring system to make sure we get notified of any server problem. I think we do a decent job of it now, but whenever anything falls through the cracks it is really bad. Also there is always room for improvement.

I had to spend allot of time reconfiguring VOIP phones today to get our test to work. We are compressing calls, so I needed to associate the phones with the compression scheme we are using. I also had to setup the phone extensions for when our customer service rep’s start using them.

Plenty of other things going on, but my head is not focused right now to remember them all. I will write more later this week.

All in all things are good, and that is all that counts!!!

Work Update

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Here is what has been going on at the time sucking void I call work. Kidding. It may be a time sucking void but I wouldn’t be doing anything else…

Fixing our monitoring system. It seems like I am always doing this, but I am spending time tweaking our monitoring system that listens to all our computer systems and pages us when something is wrong.

Keith just finished setting up the VPN link to our Kingston office. Now we have a dedicated link between our offices for just VOIP traffic. We can use an entire T-1 for voice calls. We hope to get 15-20 calls over it. We will test it this week.

We are busy building and configuring new servers. it feels like we are doing this daily. We deployed 2 new box’s this week. Something to QA stuff on, and a new data-warehouse machine.

My mail migration goes slowly since I am busy doing other things. This is not a problem except we are paying for pop accounts on our current provider still when I would like to offload these users to our own hosted mail system. That is the end result. Hopefully when done I will save a few hundred bucks a month on mail hosting.

Gus has been away on vacation and now CES. He returns Wednesday. The rest of our upper management return Monday. No joke it has been quieter without them in the office. it is not them, it is just there is like 10 less people in the office. Back to normal on monday.

Projects Updates

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Finally put into service our first Windows 2003 Active Directory server. I demoted an old 2000 box and transfered its roles to the new server.

Started redirecting call center users in NYC to our new mail server we are using for our Kingston office. The end goal is to have the entire call center on that mail system. Once I get all the alias’s and accounts done I can just delete the old mail accounts and tell everyone they have a new email address. It is a slow process since I need to edit everyones profile when they are not at work. I did about 10 people in 2 days. this rate it will take me a month to get everyone cut over.

We upgrade our Pix firewalls next tuesday to enable us to use a VPN tunnel to send large amounts of VOIP calls between offices. when I mean large amounts I mean more than the 2-3 we can now. Probably like 20 at a time on a dedicated internet T-1.

Other things going on are the guys in Kingston are working on Cisco Softphone setup’s to allow remote agents for our call center. Or to allow us to use the phones from outside the office on our laptops. Also in the works is the ability to move your phone number between desk phones if you need to.