Unified Communications and Mobility – The Death of the VOIP Handset Part 3

I’m very excited about ShoreTel’s mobility products.  Beyond a potentially very quick ROI, it has the following benefits:

• A client that runs on Blackberry, iPhone, iPad, and DROID (the DROID support coming soon).  This client allows you to set presence management (in the car, in a meeting, at home, at the office, etc) that all other users on your business phone system can see (regardless if they’re mobile or not).
• Your presence can automatically change depending on your physical location (accomplished by GPS technology).  You can turn this off (big brother?)
• The ability to dial extension-to-extension directly from your Smart Device. This “extension” can be an extension on your business phone system, another Smart Device, or both.  Does it really matter anymore?  You should only have one number or extension, the device you’re using for VOIP transmission is becoming a moot point these days.
• The ability to use the native dialer on your Smart phone, not have to launch a goofy VPN connection back to your corporate network, or not have to open a separate application on your Smart Phone.
• The ability to send corporate caller ID associated with your VOIP business phone system if you’re calling a work contact or send personal cellular caller ID if it’s a personal contact.

By the way, ShoreTel’s Mobility solution works with any business phone system – NEC, Cisco, Avaya, Mitel, etc.

This is all done with a ShoreTel Mobility Router that interfaces with your business phone system and a client that runs on the Smart Device.  If you have a VOIP phone system, we can integrate via SIP trunks.  If it’s a legacy phone system, we can integrate via PRI.

Incredible!

Travis Dillard is the President of Inflow Communications.  Inflow Communications is a Portland, Oregon-based company that designs, deploys, and supports enterprise-class VOIP, business phone systems, and Unified Communications solutions to businesses throughout Oregon, Washington, and California.

Packet Loss

Packet Loss: If your network drops packets, it’s essentially dropping pieces of the actual voice call. This obviously results in voice quality issues and dropped calls. Packet loss can be caused by network congestion, poor line quality, and distance. Since voice and video are both real time, there is no way to recover the dropped packets. Your network should ensure less than 1% packet loss to maintain toll quality.

Next post: Delay and Jitter!

Contact Inflow – we want to be your Unified Communications and VOIP business phone system partner!

Inflow Integrates ShoreTel’s Unified Communications system to an Avaya PBX (Part 1)

Inflow Communications is the first ShoreTel partner to integrate a ShoreTel Unified Communications system to an Avaya PBX for PBX and voicemail functionality.  Cronin & Caplan, one of the Northwest’s largest Windermere franchises, with over 8 locations and 400 plus agents, looked to Inflow Communications for a unique VOIP / Unified Communications solution.

Windermere had Avaya Definity business phone systems, connected over a private point-to-point network and a centralized Active Voice voicemail system.  Windermere’s original challenges:

An aging Avaya PBX platform that was too costly to support and upgrade

Windermere required advanced Unified Communications tools for their agents such as voicemail-to-email, find-me / follow-me, mobile phone integration, etc.

The ability to migrate away from their Avaya Definity systems in a manner that made logistical and economic sense.

The ability to leverage ShoreTel’s rich Unified Communication features with existing digital phone sets

Stay tuned in two days for the solution!

Traditional phone system purchase versus a managed phone system offerings:

We’ve posted a few blogs this month regarding the traditional model of purchasing technology and services versus a more forward thinking model – managed.  Generally, the following points apply: [ read more ]

Integrating ShoreTel Unified Communications Platform with Microsoft OCS

So the 10,000 pound elephant in the Unified Communications room is Microsoft and their Office Communications Server (OCS).  Between their OCS and Exchange platforms, they are now providing IP telephony, Integrating Messaging, conferencing, voicemail, and presence capabilities.  Organizations can acquire this functionality via Microsoft’s standard Client Access License (CAL) model.

ShoreTel already offers a rich desktop feature set that provides IP telephony, video, Instant Messaging, Presence Management and messaging integrating.  So why would a company want to migrate to Microsoft’s OCS Unified Communications platform?  Maybe they have already invested in the OCS licensing and want to continue leveraging the OCS features with their new business phone system deployment.  Beyond that, they don’t trust the underlying server architecture of Microsoft as their core phone system.  They want a reliable, purpose-built IP PBX for core telephony functionality, but they want to leverage the Microsoft tool set.  No problem.

Does this replace the existing business phone system or integrate with it?  The answer is both.  OCS can integrate with your existing IP telephony platform or completely replace it.  Since we are a ShoreTel phone system / Unified Communications integration partner, I’ll discuss the integration options with ShoreTel.

Integrating Microsoft OCS with your ShoreTel business phone system: In this scenario, you would deploy a ShoreTel TAPI server (best practice dictates that this runs on a dedicated server).  If you already have a ShoreTel Distributed Voicemail Server, this will suffice.  You would also load ShoreTel’s CSTA server (an application that runs on the HQ server).   Last, add one ShoreTel CSTA – Microsoft license per OCS connection.  You’ll also need a Microsoft OCS client per user.   In this scenario, you could use the Microsoft OCS client to control your ShoreTel IP phone.  You could also continue to use your ShoreTel  Call Manager with the Microsoft OCS serving as a backend IM engine.

Using Microsoft OCS SoftPhone and integrating to a ShoreTel phone system: I’ve usually seen this when customers want to start deploying the OCS SoftPhone, but want to continue using ShoreTel as the core IP Telephony platform.  In this scenario, we integrate ShoreTel with the OCS server using a gateway device.   This device converts Microsoft VOIP media streams to standard PRI signaling.  The connection into ShoreTel would be a PRI connected into a ShoreGear 220T1 or ShoreGearT1.  You’ll also need a mediation server that converts proprietary Microsoft signaling to standards-based signaling ShoreTel can understand.  This mediation server can be loaded on the gateway device or on a separate server.