Avaya Tech Masters uncovers IP Office Release 5 Deep Dive

Guest Post:

I am currently at Miami International Airport awaiting my flight back to Toronto after attending the Avaya Tech Masters Conference. The invitation only, two day annual event, brings together the top Avaya IP Office techs in North America to discuss and demonstrate what is new and exciting in the world of Avaya IP Office. Over the past two days we have had the chance to see what Avaya has done with the new 5.0 software release and what we can expect in the future. Without going into too much detail about all the new features, (many have been documented in past blogs by Jeff Wiener), let me just say the future looks very promising for Avaya and the IP Office. Avaya has shown that they are committed to providing the best user experience possible, while ensuring ease of installation and minimizing maintenance. One of the best things they have done to improve the user experience is move to browser based applications for the IP Office. The new Call Centre Reporter and One-X Portal are two examples of applications that require no client software to be installed. Both applications run in a browser which connects to a central server. Extensive testing has been done on these products, on all major browsers, including Internet Explorer 7, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and even Safari. Avaya has definitely done their homework on this new software release, far exceeding their goals for beta testing to ensure the product is ready for release (unlike some other previous versions). Over 4000 automated tests were performed on release 5.0, emulating all sorts of typical and atypical customer situations to ensure that the product is stable and reliable. Customers found defects are now at a 4 year low and continue to improve with 60% fewer system bugs than just a year ago.

One thing that I found very encouraging is that the applications are built on a solid base that works as advertised but the potential for growth and enhancements to the products is there as well. As a technician that installs and services the IP Office, improvements to the system management apps, IP Office Manager, System Status Application, System Monitor and Voicemail Pro Client will make administering and troubleshooting the system easier. For example, in the System Status Application there is a new feature for monitoring QoS issues with IP phones and trunks. This will allow us to monitor issues with QoS without using 3rd party apps to determine where the problem is.
Voicemail Pro Client now allows the administrator to clear a mailbox of all messages and stop new messages from being left in the mailbox. Alarms can also be set to ring a particular phone, at a preset time. This can be used in a hospitality environment for things like “wake up calls”.

IP Office Manager now has a few new features to make programming a new system easier as well. One of these features is that a system wide Operator can be set, eliminating the need to set this for every single user.
In the System Monitor application you can now open up a network view, which will show a graphic image of all the systems connected in a Small Community Network, showing all relevant network information about the systems.
There have also been many changes to the licensing on the IP Office. Terms that are more “user friendly” have been used to alleviate some of the obscurely worded licenses from the past. Also a lot of the more commonly used licenses have been bundled together and given plain term names that make sense to everybody, like the “Mobile Worker” and “Power User” bundles.

These are just a few examples of the many improvements that have been made to the IP Office. One of the most encouraging things I picked up from the two day conference is that Avaya has a lot of passionate people working on this product. They really want our input and rely on it to improve their product. The technicians I have met over the past two days are some of the most knowledgeable and committed people I have come across in my over twenty years in the industry. Avaya’s management team was great at listening to our concerns and seemed genuinely interested in the ways they could improve their product. The engineers at the conference were amazing and able to answer any question or concern we threw at them with conviction, these guys really know the product! It was nice to put a face to some of the people I had only talked to on the phone for support before.

A new system for keeping Tech Masters in touch with each other to exchange information and access documents will be in place within a few weeks, this will make sure that everyone is always on the same page, up to date and informed. These past few days have been a great experience and reinforce my opinion that the IP Office is one of the best options on the market for a communications system that gives businesses just about everything they would need or want in a reliable, intuitive and user friendly system. The people at Avaya really put on a great event, one that was very informative and also fun. We all got the chance to partake in some friendly competition as they took us to a local mini Gran Prix event in which teams competed against each other in a spirited race. Everyone had a great time and it gave us a chance to unwind and have some fun with each other. All in all, Avaya put on a great event which I look forward to returning to in the years to come.

Chris

Avaya’s new web based call center app – Customer Call Reporter. A “paradigm shift” in call center Apps

I recently had an opportunity to spend some time with the new Avaya CCR (Customer Call Reporter) call center reporting (real time and historical) package.

On first glance I really like what I saw – impressive for a “controlled release” version. One of the biggest improvements is ease of installation and deployment. Instead of the usual delta server with CCC which could take upwards of 4 hours to load (or longer), the new CCR is an entirely web based application which loads, and configures in 1 to 2 hours . The web piece will of course simplify future management, debugging, upgrading, and supporting of CCR. And best of all, the app worked on my Mac. This is the 2nd all-new application that was not available before IPOffice’s release 5 software, the other being One-X Portal.

The Mac thing is not something non Mac users will appreciate of course, but, I’m always forgoing programs because they just don’t work on a Mac.

Entering information info the web browser was very quick and responsive, and, quite surprisingly, I used the app for about 1 hour and it didn’t crash!! The review is really based on 1 hour of play time, and I will write an update in a couple of weeks once we have installed our first client site, and I have had more time to play with CCR.

Like its predecessor, CCR will provide real time monitoring for both Supervisors and Call Center Agents. The Supervisor can program up to 3 real time views of their call center, and the agent can log in, select a Supervisor, and then view the stats for themselves and the queues that they are a member of. Apparently it is possible to set-up 100 variations of queue and agent stats, but I only entered 10.

Like CCC, CCR will support alarm monitoring, and these alarm stats are viewable in the historical reporting.

The historical reporting is also browser based – it works really well. You drag the report from the left hand side of the screen into the report type, choose your filters, hours… and VIEW. Although the system only shows 6 reports on the left hand side, it is possible (apparently) using the filters to produce 100 different reports.

One shortcoming is the inability to report call center stats across multiple IP Offices. This will be coming in a future release.

Overall, CCR is definitely a step in the right direction. The world is moving to cloud computing, HTML, browsers, and this product follows in those steps.

Avaya IP Office One X Portal – Finally. It works on my MAC !

I’ve had an opportunity to play with the Avaya IP Office One-X Portal for the last 2 days. The One X Portal is a browser based version of Phone Manager, the phone desktop software that allows you to take complete desktop control of your Avaya IP Office telephone (5410 / 5420 / 5610 … for example)

So far, some great, and some not so great. The good news first:

This is long overdue. I’ve been waiting for a software component that will allow me to make phone calls through my MAC. I’ve been a very happy MAC user for the last year, and one of my misgivings about running on the MAC is some of the software apps that I have become accustomed to using on my PC that are not available on the MAC. The One-X Portal changes that.

Now I can load my Firefox browser, log into my extension, and take MAC desktop control of my telephone through my Firefox browser. Type a phone number into the screen, and the phone goes off hook to dial. Click disconnect, and the call is gone.

Goto my Directory box and all of the office extensions are visible along with the users status; busy, DND, available … click on the users name, and it dials the call.

There are other boxes – voice mail, and call log. All very similar in function to Phone Manager except I don’t think I can initiate screen pops using One X Portal, at least not with my MAC. Screen pops require TAPI, and I didn’t see an option in the configure tab to allow for “screen pops” of apps to my desktop.

From an installation point of view – well, there is no installation. It’s a browser.

I even tried this using my iPhone browser and it works as well.

Now some of the downside – we are running IP Office BETA release 5, so, I have to have some patience with the software. So far, other then a couple of bugs, I have found release 5 to be very stable and offer some amazing new features.

http://www.thetelecomblog.com/2009/07/01/avaya-ip-office-%E2%80%93-release-5-%E2%80%93-some-amazing-new-features/

One X Portal seems a little flaky. It’s crashed a few times on my PC and my MAC. It’s frozen both my Firefox (MAC), and Browser (Windows) to the point that I had to stop and re-start the browser app., and re-launch the browser. It seems to always be “loading” – the little wheel that spins in the browser bar is always spinning. I suspect it needs to constantly re-fresh. The app is not as instant – I’ve had calls come into my phone and then 2 seconds later display on my browser. Phone Manager is INSTANT. The colors are a little drab – although that will be an easy fix.

All in all, definitely a step in the right direction and long overdue. Way to go Avaya !

Jeff

Digitcom.ca, 250 Rimrork Rd., Toronto, Canada.

Digitcom runs the Avaya IP Office in our Toronto office