May 2009 Archives

Encryption of VoIP traffic was, for some of us a humorous concept. I remembered as a young development professional how much fun it was to use a packet sniffer to capture the bosses packets and reassemble his email over the LAN.  Years before that when I worked at the phone company as a central office test engineer, it was not uncommon to find an interesting phone call and plug it into the over head paging system to provide entertainment for the late night test  crew. There are times  I still think the concept of encryption on VoIP is humorous, but it is becoming less funny all the time as we move toward end to end VoIP with no TDM at all in a world populated by terrorists and other evil doers. 

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ShoreTel has a family of new media gateways.  The more interesting switches are referred to as SGV switches.  There is an SG50V and an SG90V that differ only in the number of FXO and FXS ports that they support.  What makes these switches (i.e.

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Voip Solutions
If you ask your average IT professional what a T span is, the usual response will be that it is a 1.5MB connection to the internet. Ask your average telecom tech what a T span is and you will be told it is 24 channels of dial tone! Ask a ShoreTel VoIP Engineer what a T span is and you should get the answer:, "what do you want it to be"? One of the great challenges of implementing a business VoIP solution is the absolute requirement that the implementation team possess an interdisciplinary skill set. Continue Reading...

ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center has several features that are often confused: Abandoned Call, Call Back and Dial Lists. Thought the features are somewhat similar, they work in different applications and not all for these features are available in the basic Contact Center. The ShoreTel ECC uses the concept of a service to encapsulate the handling of an incoming phone call. Generally the Service includes Groups, which include Agents, but groups can  encompass other call actions. Continue Reading...

In telephony, VOIP QOS is somewhere between a science and an art.  Setting up QOS on your network is essential for toll quality voice from end point to end point, especially across a WAN.Historically, in ShoreTel, IP packets were marked with the DSCP value set in the Call Control Options page.  Generally  this is generally set as a value of 184 or Precedence Level 5, what CISCO would call Express Forwarding or EF. This value is represented as 184  (10111000 or 46) but as a TOS/Differential Service Control Point marking it is  only applied to the IP layer and has no impact on your LAN.   Continue Reading...

Prior to release of ShoreTel Contact Center Version 5.0,  reporting was essentially statistical analysis. The Contact Center had very useful report generation capabilities that included  the ability to add and delete columns to existing pre-defined reports. The reports, however, were generated largely as summary reports based on accumulated totals of events.  For example, you could generate an Agent Performance report that could report the total number of calls presented; total call answered; average call holding time; average talk time over a specified interval. 

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If you are an iPhone aficionado, you absolutely want your iPhone to work  on your ShoreTel IPBX! I recently downloaded VeNetCorps SipPhone fromt the iPhone App store! There are several SIP phone apps at the store, but most have a pre-programmed domain name for the sip registration proxy server. If you want to use your own SIP proxy there was no easy way to change the IP address so you had to hack your DNS to get it to point to the ShoreTel SIP proxy. Continue Reading...