Cisco

Visiting Friends

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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

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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!!!

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.

T-Zones

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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

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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

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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.

Home At Last

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I finally made it home. I was in Kingston from Sunday to Wednesday night. I ran out of clean clothes and I was really low on the med’s so I came home. Keith is up there today (thursday) and friday. I go back next week again. I actually have 2 days in the office this week. It is weird. I haven’t worked a full day at the office since Monday the 11th. It is the 21 now. Wow.

I got a ride home from Kingston from one of our Integrators from Expanets. I know I used to hate that company but the tech guys we are working with are all awesome. Chad our Cisco expert fixed up all our switches and call manager. I learned allot of stuff from him, but would have liked to learn allot more.

Keith is working on the desktop security profile for Kingston while he is up there. I already did 99% of the desktop ghost image for the computers we are starting with. I figured out the problem with Ghost 7.5 and our Compaq (HP) Evo 510’s. I was able to modify the disk we use with the with our older Evo 310’s.

I also got the White (voice) patch panel done Wednesday. It looks good, or as good as we can get it with the time we have. Joe will do the blue cables next.

hectic day!

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Work was crazy today. I have a ton of people coming in tomorrow for interviews. On top of that I was working like crazy to set in stone our hardware config’s for the new office. Keith got the 2 Cisco Pix 515 firewalls we will use in Kingston so he is going to start configuring that. I finally ordered a replacement web server, and a disk storage array. I had approval for this stuff for over a month but I didn’t have the time in the schedule to deploy it. Now we need to get it done.

T-1 install dates still haunt me. 1 circuit was supposed to go in today and I have no word on its status. I still don’t have dates for my 3 long distance circuits. I hate having no power to do anything with these moron’s at the phone companies.

Back to work, and then off again…

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So I had a semi normal day at work monday. I was trying to catch up with all the craziness that went on while I was away. I still haven’t caught up. I sat through a demo of phone call recording software. it was cool, but I don’t know what our Call Center QA people really want. I like that you can search people’s calls by keywords and pull up a audio file on the computer of that call. It is crazy what they can do these days.

I found out late monday that I needed to be in Kingston NY today. Construction started on our new facility yesterday and they will be having weekly meetings on the status of everything. I needed to go because I have some outstanding construction issues. I won’t do that trip every week for those meetings but I will probably need to do a few of them as this project moves along. Things are taking longer than anyone thought, but it is construction and not internet sites.

Being out got crazier on monday when I found out Gus was going to Minnesota today to demo some software. He needed a wireless intent connection on his laptop. I couldn’t get the PCMCIA card he wanted quick enough so I stole Keith’s phone and put Verizon’s high speed internet access on it.

While I was out today they did a bunch of user moves. That means that people’s desk’s got moved around. Generally in my company if you get moved you are getting crammed in with someone else and you won’t be happy. We are not popular people when that happens. We are Technology guy’s but somewhere along the line we got roped into doing space allocation and moves. We had someone almost in tears once when we doubled them up. Not pretty.

I am back in the office tomorrow and hopefully I can bang out some more work. My list of work keeps getting bigger. I guess that is a good thing, but stuff gets overwhelming sometimes. I just take a deep breath, and get by on star-bucks mocha frapachino’s (cannot spell) and snickers bars! They have a calming affect on me during the summer months.

The boss man Gus is out till thursday so tomorrow’s staff meeting might be a 3 ring circus. Our project manager Mark is good to keep things on track in those things. I think he and I are the only one’s that try to push aside the BS to smaller group chats. Of course Gus is the king at cutting through the bull, and keeping things on track. We will miss him tomorrow.

Standards, Standards, Standards

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So today and tomorrow we deal with standards. Our hardware standard, the basis for how we buy and configure our Database Servers has been in place for just over a year. I have been getting complaints about no space, and some speed issues from others. I have called the brains together to get what is required for a standard over the next 12 months. That way I can buy them what they want and then tell them to shut up when they complain about it. Well, not exactly. But we need a blue print for how we do things for the next several months.

Also tomorrow I am meeting with our development people (well some of them anyway) to discuss our build standards for web servers. Same concept as hardware standards, but we talk about how to configure the OS on our web box’s. Once done we will refresh our web servers and set them up fresh.

As I left the office yesterday we had a problem with an apache web box we are using for a small project. turns out that this is considered important to our call center management. Now we need to fix the problem, and then take this applicaiton and make it redundant. We probibly will need to put it on 2 linux machines and place them behind our local directors. A local director is a device that splits the load of a web site amount multiple servers. Cool device.

On another front I have tons of outstanding quotes to get approved. Hardware requests just pile up. What is crazy is most of this stuff is not even related to our new office build. This is just normal office stuff that needs to be taken care of.

I haven’t yet found someone to run our new office’s helpdesk. Most applicants are not from the region. We need someone near by. Also most don’t have the skills. People do not read online job postings. They apply for jobs that don’t meat their qualifications at all. It is just a waste of time for everyone.

We spoke with our Project Manager and team for our phone system build out. The hardware is almost all in. We are sending them some network diagrams and stuff. Then we stage the system. I am excited. This will be awsome if it works out well. I think it will. Brand new systems can be designed without having to factor in old problems. We shall see… In the tunnel now. More later.