Call Manager

My New VOIP (Home) Phone

by

I finally broke down and purchased another VOIP phone for my house. If you are someone who actually reads this regularly you will know last summer I got Vonage for about 2 weeks. it was too expensive for me to justify keeping it so I got rid of it. I am not home enough to warrant a home phone. I have been fine with my mobile.

Fast forward 14 months and I found a company that offers relatively cheap VOIP and offers all the cool features I wanted. Jayson found Broad Voice. They offer a $9.99 plan that gives you unlimited in state calls. That is all I needed so I got it. They also offer a function that AT&T Callvantage offers that allows me to have my phone right simultaneously on several phones. Now I can have my home phone ring at work, on my cell, etc at the same time. I have wanted one number to route to multiple lines for years. I used to use AT&T’s 500 number service back in the early 90’s but that was expensive and you paid per inbound calls. This is better. Whatever phone I pick up first is the phone that the call gets routed to.

What is also cool is that this company unlike allot of other VOIP providers allow you the option of bringing your own VOIP device or ATA adapter. What that means for me is if want I can configure a Cisco 7940 phone I have at work and use that with this service. I actually have been trying to do that today, but I am running into issues since our Cisco phones are configured for Skinny (to work with a Cisco Call Manager) and for this service I need SIP. No matter what Cisco says it is not simple to change the configuration. For now I am just routing all my calls to my mobile. I get 30 days to try it out, and it is only like $15 a month after tax’s and extra features. Not bad for unlimited local calls. I can use my mobile for long distance!

More reviews as I get it. Jayson and Gus are both waiting to see how I like this company, but they are both interested in the service.

Allot To Write About

by

I have allot to write about, but for some reason don’t feel that up to writing today. So here will be a quick recap of the weekend.

I continued to throw stuff out of my apartment in anticipation of my move next month.

I am also getting ready to ebay a bunch of tech stuff I have. I realized that allot of my crap is not worth that much anymore used. So it is easier to just keep it and or give it away.

Had dinner with Carrie, and my grandmother tonight. Morgan also! My grandmother was in to visit my cousin who is sick. She took us to dinner. it was actually pleasant. That is not always the case with my grandmother.

Got a hair cut on Saturday. My regular barber wasn’t there. Not sure what his deal was. His father did my hair. Didn’t do a good job. it is ok, but he didn’t listen to me when I gave him instructions. That may be the last time I go to that place since I am moving. I need to find a new place in the city for next time.

We had an issue with one of our Call Manager Servers Saturday that caused it to fail. The second machine in the cluster took over fine, but we had about 15 seconds of down time while that happened. Kai is working on getting a patch for it. I spent allot of Saturday working on the phone system because of that, and other issues.

The plus side is I did some more work on our IVR. I even setup our own for Support, to prove the concept. An IVR for support is overkill but we had extra 800#’s and it shows that they system can work.

This blog entry was written while listening to Machine Head by Bush

Blackberry’s & Nextel

by

I finally approved getting the first of several new blackberry’s for our on call teams. I was holding off since the cost of the device was allot ($350). The current blackberries we have were only between $100 and $200 to purchase. Of course they are the smaller pager stye ones. Unfortunately no one seems to be selling them anymore. Everyone is trending towards the all in one pager, cell phone device. For us this isn’t the greatest. Almost all of us already have cell phones, so the pager/phone combo just adds weight to what we want to carry around.

The reason we are buying the more expensive units is simple. The current system we use with the pager style blackberry’s are charging a flat rate for up to 1mb of email. Then they charge you for every kb over that. We send alert pages to these devices and some months our overages can be $100 – $150 per device. Knowing that, by switching to Nextel’s blackberry server with a flat rate all you can receive plan we will over time save more money. I figure if we pay for $50 overages per pager per month, the $350 pager pays for itself after 7 months. We have had some of our older pagers for over 2 years and some of them are in great shape. That means in the long run we save cash.

Another added feature that made the decision easier was the fact that these new blackberry’s have Nextel direct connect. We get unlimited use of direct connect for free with the plan we have. It becomes useful when we deploy that to everyone who is on call. The goal is to improve our paging and on call system as best as possible while saving money. Man I am really starting to sound like a manager:(

We get our new blackberry today I hope. That would give me the weekend to play with it. Jayson already has one. We can test the direct connect. He loves the email functions on his. I have been using my Treo for a while, and I like it. But the blackberry seems to deliver mail faster, and it is easier to type on. I think my blackberry use may be making a comeback. Not sure yet!

This blog entry was written while listening to Sad Songs from the album “Beneath These Fireworks” by Matt Nathanson

Jayson At Work

by

Jayson will be in New York Monday night. He is going to do some contract work for my company for a few weeks while we search for a helpdesk person. I have a bunch of projects he is going to help me on. If all goes well we will improve our data center allot!!!

I am a bit nervous about him coming up. Not sure why. He is very professional and works fast. I am a bit rattled by Keith leaving, and Jay is another person I know coming to work. I vouched for him, so I am a bit nervous. I don’t think he will let me down, but I worry anyway. It will be interesting to work with him again. The last time we did was back in 1999 when we were in Baton Rouge.

It will be weird having one of my oldest friends working for me, even temporarily. On the plus side is we get along so well, and he is no nonsense like me. We should get allot done.

On the flip side I have a guy starting monday that will be our Release Manager. He will also work with our production systems providing support. He seems pretty sharp, so I am hoping for the best. Lots of change recently. Change is good, but it can be scary.

This blog entry was written while listening to Wherever You Will Go by The Calling

Extension Mobility

by

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.

Visiting Friends

by

Spoke to my friend Jayson today.  he is planing on coming into NYC for a week in february.  He is going to take a Cisco Voice Over IP class.  I think he is a punk for needing to take a class in it, but he owns his own buisness.  In order to get clients he needs to not just prove he knows the stuff, he needs certification in it.

He may stay by me while he is up here.  I don’t see him much so I think it would be fun.  I need to get down to New Orleans and hang with him, joe and gretchen soon also.

I told him he should come to work with me and see a Cisco Call Manager in action.  He was at the our "parent" company office when Jeff & Dave where there, but hasn’t ever made it to our current office.

Hopefully that will be a fun visit.  I look forward to it.

VOIP Rocks

by

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!!!

T-Zones

by

So the cell number switch looks like it is done and working. Besides having my voice mail reset and loosing my T-Zones internet access everything worked. I had to call to have the internet setup again and then I was off and running. Lets see if my bill is screwed up because of this. I was not under contract and hope to remain that way. I like keeping my options open.

Still enjoying my Treo 270, but the battery keeps dying at night if I use it all day. Still waiting for the 600…….. and waiting, and waiting…….

This entry was written while listening to Stacies Mom from the album “Welcome Interstate Managers” by Fountains of Wayne

Service Observe And Phone Stuff

by

Today I dealt with finalizing a solution for “service observe” in our new call center. We want the ability to listen in on our rep’s calls so we can QA them. Cisco’s VOIP solution does not offer that out of the box. I don’t know why, but it doesn’t. We have a company we are looking at, but we want to be sure things work correctly before we order it.

Also today I configured up 4 Cisco 7940 IP phones to use in our NYC office. We need some in case we are overwhelmed with calls on next monday. We should be able to have a total of 5 phones ready to go if needed.

Configuring the Cisco phones is really cool. They are programable via the Call Manager web site, and you can reboot the phone remotely. To get them to work, all you need to do is set the phone to DHCP and have the proper TFTP server config in the scope. It is not bad once you get the hang of it.

I was using my Cisco phone all day to talk to Joe, Justin, & David in our Kingston office.

We are planning a test of our T-1 redundancy on friday. The work to provide roll over and redundancy was completed and we will test it friday to make sure it works for mondays move of voice traffic. We need 3 voice T-1’s to work together so if calls come in and one T-1 is full, they roll over to the next one. This is also helpful in redundancy in case one circuit fails to work. We won’t need all 3 next week, but we will probably use up one and goto a little on the second one.

The Long Reach Of Voice Over IP

by

Today was a momentous day. We finally received power supplies for 2 Cisco VOIP phones. With 1 entry into our DHCP scope we turned the phone on and it saw the Cisco Call Manager. Call Manager is like a PBX or phone switch. Within 2 minutes we were making calls to my cell phone to test. It worked great. The only minor issues we have are making calls to different extensions on the same phone system. Small routing issue that we are working through.

The next step is to be able to use our call center software in NYC connecting to the servers in Kingston. We are having some minor issues with that, but we are slowly working through them. If that works we will be able to take calls in two facilities using one phone system. This is big if we have capacity issues in our new space down the road.

I now have a cisco phone at my desk in NYC. I hope to fix all the problems this week. I am very excited about getting this working.