VOIP

IPCC Is a Go

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After months of negotiating (and years of thinking and talking about it) my company finally decided to purchase Cisco’s IPCC software. Gus and I started looking into this stuff way back in December of 2002. It didn’t pan out. We ended up going to Cisco Call Manager 3.3.2 with our incumbent ACD Zeacom Smartconnect. Call Manager was a vast improvement over our Avaya Magix system we were using so we were sort of happy. Unfortunately Smartconnect has major problems integrating with Call Manager. We have uncovered several issues that have taken us months to overcome. Other issues are not correctable.

As we grow the need for a new contact center software became apparent. We looked at the major players, Cisco, Genisys, & Aspect. We were slightly limited with our options because we were already on Cisco’s Call Manager IP phone IP-PBX. That made us need to look at Genisys’s and Aspect’s IP based products. The problem with them was that either very few or no one was using them on Cisco’s Call Manager (CCM). To me that was one of the two killer problems for our situation. The other problem was integration. As we saw with Smartconnect the “hooks” that tied the Software to our IP-PBX was critical. Cisco was great at selling the integration between CCM and IPCC. Of course you assume there will be tight integration between the two, they are both Cisco products. The other two companies (in my opinion) had problems proving the tightness of their software to CCM. And for a major purchase such as this, I needed to be totally comfortable with the software we were buying. Because even if no one said it, if this integration fails peoples heads will be looking at me as to why.

There is allot to be said by having “one throat to choke” when dealing with hundreds of thousands of dollars of phone gear. The up hill battle for IPCC was proving to our business people that the ease of use and functionality of IPCC was on par with Genisys.

So my multiple trips to Boston, Philly, Kingston, etc, and endless conversations with sales guys and pre sales engineers have finally paid off. And if you know me, dealing with sales guys a fate worse than death (sometimes).

The next step is scheduling this massive upgrade to not interfere with our other major projects going on. Such as expanding into our new Call Center space downstairs, new Fulfillment system, and upgrades to our data center infrastructure.

As part of this upgrade we will also be upgrading our voice mail from smartconnect’s voice mail system to Cisco’s unity. We will also need/want to upgrade call manager to 4.x after we are done with the IPCC upgrade. This is because Smartconnect as of now does not support CCM 4.x, so that upgrade has to come after we move to IPCC.

This will be exciting but stressful.

New BroadVoice Account

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This story starts out with me wanting to configure a Cisco 7940 phone we had for our Call Manager to work with my VOIP provider. I never did get it to work. I ended up with a nice Motorola cordless phone plugged into the ATA device Broadvoice sent me. I have wanted to tinker with getting the Cisco phone to work with SIP for months but didn’t. Truth be told I hadn’t really put much effort into it until today. After tinkering with some TFTP files and some firmware updates from Cisco I was able to convert the phone over to SIP. This enabled me to order the Broadvoice service without needing the ATA adapter.

I have been happy enough with my BroadVoice account that I signed my company up for one. We have a POTS line in our cage in our data center. It costs $50 a month for the dam thing. We use it like 4 times a month. The problem is that it is a life saver to have when calling in a server or communicating a problem to others from the data center. Broadvoice’s plan for $10 a month was too good a savings to pass up. I was able to get the phone configured in 10 minutes after I got the SIP firmware on it. Now all we need to do is move the phone to our data center and setup a firewall rule to allow it to work.

Wireless, Wireless, World

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I was busy Tuesday. At work I had issues with our Wifi setup. Gus has complained about it for years, but I never find anything wrong with it. On monday I did notice that it was just not working at all. I took my old 802.11b wifi point from home into work to troubleshoot. The point I had at home is the same type we use at the office. Back in the day it was top of the line. Now, not so much. Turns out both points at work are bad. The Wifi cards are fried. We are running off of my old point for now. I want it back so I can ebay it, but I will keep it at work until we can purchase new ones.

At home I had wifi issues of my own. I wanted a new 802.11g point at my house for a while. Ever since I got my VPN firewall I have been without high speed wireless. So since work got my old B point (that I should have sold long ago) I finally went to Best Buy and got a new Linksys 802.11G point. I set that up in no time. My problems started when I tried to configure the Wireless Bridge (802.11b if you were wondering) I had lying around. After hours of messing with it, I finally got it to work correctly. Right now it is plugged into my VOIP phone so I could put the phone in my bedroom without pulling any cables. it is neat. My eventual goal is to plug the bridge into my Tivo so I don’t have a cable running from my router to my TV wall unit.

I like the bridge so much I may get another one and keep the phone where it is. I have all the components to go totally wireless. I have a 802.11g card for my desktop. The only down side of wireless is if I want to transfer large files, which I do sometimes. For now everything works!!!

Cisco Executive Briefing

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It sounds fancier than it was. Gus, Dave, Kai, and I went up to Cisco Systems Executive Briefing Center outside of Boston. We were getting the overview of their IPCC product from all the product managers and engineers working on the system. First off I will say I think the trip was worth it. I think there were some issues still unresolved by some of our team, that I think Cisco was able to handle.

We got up to Boston by noonish. Our account manager and his boss picked Gus and I up from the train and we drove the 40 minutes to the site. it is a nice new campus. We ate lunch, which was surprisingly good. Normally this sort of stuff is not what I consider good food. They had nice chicken dish with stuffing and potatoes. I was stuffed for hours after that. We meet a VP of sales or something who came down to make sure we were getting treated right. I am not sure what Gus said to whoever at Cisco but around August they started treating us really nice. Far better than I would expect from a company our size. Granted we do some advanced stuff for a company our size, but it is weird when the #3 guy or so at Cisco stops by your office for a meeting. I will say that Cisco is very responsive to questions or problems. Some of my / Gus’ comments have reached high levels. it showed with the presentation.

We got a really good overview of their IPCC product. I think Dave was pleased with what he saw. I was. I also got to see some nice warez from them. We checked out the color VOIP phone. Gus and I also test drove the video conference functionality of Call Manager 4.1. I even got to see the long rumored VOIP WiFi cordless phone. It was so cool. I want one for my house, but a practical deployment of it would be for the supervisors in the call center when we have 2 floors to cover. Check out the MOB for some of the really cool tech we saw. No pictures of the video conference system we used. Just trust me that it was way cool.

We had a long fact filled day. Then we rushed off to catch a late train. We made it to the station with 15 minutes to spare. I decided to upgrade to First Class. I figured I wanted good service one time, and I would pay for it out of my own pocket. I am on the train now. The seats are bigger. There are less people in the First Class car. I also got dinner and free drinks. The food is MUCH better than Biz class. I had a steak with potato’s, with chrem brule. I cannot spell it. I was not a fan of the desert anyway. I am sitting at a conference table for 4 by myself. It is roomy. I was hoping to take a nap, but I haven’t written a detailed blog entry for a while so I decided to take the time now. So was the upgrade worth the money? Probably not, but it is nice to get waited on and just relax sometimes. Amtrak for the money has the best upgrades. And that is saying allot since the Biz class on the Acela Express is nice as it is. Right now this is my favorite form of travel.

Road Trip 2

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Yesterday Gus, Dan, and I were off again on another road trip. This time one of our account rep’s drove us all down to Philly. We visited a cool client of theirs (names of vendor’s and clients are being obscured, sorry it is confusing to you). We checked out their ACD system and the phone system they use. I liked what I saw. it was a nice operation. I learned a bunch about the product we were looking at. Since we were in Philly I had a Philly Cheese Steak. it was good. I wanted a nap after it!

My problem was the really long drive there and back in the rain. I don’t like long car trips. I don’t mind the train or the plane as much.

I was also out of the office 3 days last week. I will be out again at least 2 days this up coming week. I am busy. That means jayson is over worked since he is alone (danny is helpful, but he has releases as his first priority). Then all the work I need to do is piling up for me when I return on monday.

After work I went back to Dan’s to hang out. Alyssa, Dari, and Jennifer came over also. I fixed his wifi point. Dan, DO NOT touch the dam point again. It didn’t take me that long, so no biggie. We hung out and played scatigories. I think that was the name. I won the first game, but sucked on the second game.

Road (Train) Trip

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Today I took a train trip with Dan, & Gus to the Boston area.  We visited a site that is running a call center software package that we are looking to buy.  It was a productive day, sort of.  We learned allot.  But I like doing, and not talking so I get bored sometimes doing this sort of stuff.  We did go over really cool stuff, so I was interested.

The travel was boring.  We took Amtrak’s Acela  Express to Boston.  I have taken the old meteorologic before but the Acela was nice.  At least I got to do some work for allot of the trip.  From NYC to the Boston area it was about 3:20 minutes.  We didn’t go to the end of the line though.  As Jayson put it today "I spent an hour less on the train than he worked all day".  Very true, unfortunately.

This was day 2 out of 3 that I was out of the office.  I stayed home yesterday from an overnight I did.  Today was travel, and tomorrow is more travel.  We are going to Philly to visit another site.  Tomorrow we are driving, or being driven down.  I would rather take the train, but Philly is closer than Boston.

More news about that trip after it happens…

A Single Minded Day

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Some days I cannot remember what it was that I did at work. Today I only did one thing almost the entire day. I cannot forget what I did if I tried. I worked on fixing our Call Manager all day. Call Manager is the Voice Over IP version of the PBX. It is basically the computers that control our phone system. Last night Kai and Jayson upgraded our Cisco Call Manager’s to version 3.3.3 from 3.3.2. When you read the version number change you (I) think it is a minor fix. Well the latest version (it is the latest version we are using, but there is a 3.3.4, and a 4.0 now) does some things differently. Kai and Jay got the upgrade done, and tested all the phones in our call center. Everything seemed to work. What they couldn’t test was our remote phones. The phones in our NYC office didn’t work. We didn’t know this until hours after they went off to sleep. They left word that we may need to upgrade the firmware on the phones, but that was it. Turns out the firmware upgrades automatically when you reboot the phone and their is a newer version of the firmware.

The problem was the phones could make outbound calls, but could not receive calls. when you called the phones in a remote office the phone would ring but if you picked it up the Call Manager didn’t recognize that the call started. this is not good if we want to our reps to take calls. So off to call Cisco I went. This all happened before or as I got to the office. What a way to start the day that I knew I was going to be short handed anyway. Kai and Jay were both off to sleep because of their overnight. So after a long and drawn out troubleshooting session with Cisco we figured out our problem. I actually spoke to 2 guys over there. the first guy gave me the right answer but could not explain why we had to do what he asked. Since it required me to change firewall rules and we upgraded a phone system not the firewall I was skeptical. So the second Cisco guy came into the picture. He walked me through the same troubleshooting process (a bit quicker than the first guy). he then made some phone calls and got back to me. Turns out the first cisco support guy was right we needed to change some rules on our Cisco Pix’s. Why? Well in the new version of our CCM (Cisco Call Manager) they changed how some protocol’s operate. So what worked in older versions of CCM didn’t work in the newer version. We had to remove to fix-up protocol lines on all of our Pix’s that are involved in the VPN that makes up our WAN. Sure enough Kai was right. Kai as in Kai the cisco rep I spoke to, not Kai the guy I work with. I made the two firewall rules and the phones started working. Elapsed time on the whole saga, 8 hours. I got the phones working exactly at 5PM.

During this adventure I had other fun things to think about. Sean and danny dealt with problems with an index on a database somewhere that was causing one of our websites to be slow. Word of advise to people I work with. When I am fiddling with one phone, on another phone and talking to someone on a nextel and you know a system is down, don’t come and tell me about another problem that you need me to work on. I can only do 4-5 things at once. Thankfully Sean was able to get a handle on the index problem and fix it with little to no help from me.

Danny was helpful in my network trouble shooting saga today. Everyone else was surprisingly not bothersome. usually when I have a major problem people come out of the woodwork to bug me about minor issues, or that is how it feels.

I was crazed today. Am I glad it is over? Of course I am, but there is something to be said about days like this. First, it goes by so quick. Second, it is the type of day that you earn your salary. You get a few of the each year, and when you live it you hate it, but after you live through those days you are a better person for surviving them. On a personal note I am glad I got through the issue mostly by myself. Danny did give me great assistance in the network trapping, but allot of it was second opinion from what we got from Cisco. It is good having someone else around who you can sound off ideas to. I think Danny and I work great in that respect. On a whole I had to tackle most of this issue by myself. In the past that is not a big deal. Recently I have been delegating allot of the day to day technical responsibilities. It is something that I have to do, but I feel like I get rusty by not doing hands on work all the time. Days like today keep me sharp and lets me prove to myself that I am still in the game and can get dirty with the best of them, or so I think.

More VOIP Updates

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Several things finally came together on my VOIP odyssey this weekend. For one I solved a problem I have been having for some time. I also got off my ass and plugged in my new Linksys VPN Router. I started to setup static VPN tunnels to work. For one thing I proved I can setup a static IPSEC tunnel to a Pix with a cheap ($150 or cheaper) router. At first I still could not connect to one of our offices. I had the same problem with the Pix 501 I had. Or at first I thought it was the same problem. With the 501 I couldn’t connect to that office either. I was beginning to think it was not me but the Pix at that office. Turns out when I had my Pix 501 I had 1 issue. With the new Linksys VPN router the problem was a new one. Turns out the fail-over Pix we have at the office uses the IP address of 10.1.1.1. That is all nice and good, but that was what I used for my router at home. That didn’t work well. I had to give my router a new address and recreate the VPN tunnel. Everything started working then.

Now I have 2 tunnels (if and when I want them) to work. I don’t need VPN software. This is a good test since now I do not need VPN software on a computer in order to establish a VPN connection. What that means is I can plug in a VOIP phone and connect to my office’s call manager. I did just that. Now I have a 7940 phone connecting into our CCM (cisco call manager) system sitting on my desk at home. This is different to what I was trying to do with the 7940 and my BroadVoice connection. Now I can log into the phone at home and get my extension from work. I can prove that we can do this with remote agents if we choose to do so. We probably won’t but it is a nice technological feat to say we can. We want to go with the cheaper soft-phone option for remote agents, but having the ability to put a phone in someone’s house is nice to know you can. Have I mentioned that I have a cool job, or that VOIP is awesome???

In addition to the work phone I now have setup. I finally got my VOIP ATA adapter from the lovely folks at Broadvoice on Monday. I plugged it in after calling them and changing my account back to use that adapter. In minutes the adapter registered and I was off and running. I plugged in my new cordless phone and I had phone service. Did I mention it is only $10 a month? Now I was an early adopter of not having a home phone. I still use my cell as my main phone, but it is nice to not have to worry about the battery dying on a long call. Truth be told I want the VOIP service for the simultaneous ring option that I have. I am able to have calls ring on my home phone, my cell, blackberry, and work phone at the same time. I have a few kinks I am working out but otherwise that has been very cool.

Some problems I have to work out. I am back to using my old 802.11b wireless point. My 802.11g point was built into my old router. Now that I have a VPN router I can’t use that router. I need to buy a stand alone “g” point. I also need to break out a 5 port switch and daisy chain it off of my router. With the Wifi point, both my personal and work phones, plus my desktop and laptop, plus a tivo I have ran out of network ports on my 4 port router. Thankfully I think I have enough components to build 2 computers and extra network gear in my closet. He I don’t throw out very much stuff.

Ok, time for bed…

VOIP Update

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I have given up with the Cisco 7940 phone. I went out and bought a Motorola 5.8GHZ cordless phone. I will plug it into the ATA adapter (the device that actually turns a VOIP call into something an analog phone can understand) that Broad Voice sends me on Monday.

On another VOIP note I still need to configure the linksys VPN router I got so I can see if I can establish a static tunnel to the office. If I can do that I can get a Cisco phone to work with my office extension.

Also got the approval to purchase the network gear for our ongoing build out of our call center. I have to get the paper work together and get the integrator to order the switch. Looks like we will go with a Cisco Catalyst 4000 series switch. I am also getting some more product details on some other projects we are looking at from our Cisco engineer on Monday.

My New VOIP (Home) Phone

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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.