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 – Release 5 – some amazing new features

I have been picking up tidbits of information about the next release of the Avaya IP Office over the last month.

A few of the biggies include:
- IP Office redundancy: here’s how this one works. You can have the IP phones from a primary IP Office cabinet fail over to a redundant alternate cabinet, and vice versa. This redundancy can be either local (LAN), or wide area (WAN). So, let’s say you have a primary IP Office in Toronto, Canada with 250 users, and an alternate IP Office in Chicago with 100 users. The handsets from Toronto can re-authenticate to the alternate switch in Chicago if the system in Toronto fails, and vice versa with Toronto providing the back-up for the Chicago system. Add some SIP trunks:

http://www.thetelecomblog.com/2009/06/18/sip-trunking-%E2%80%93-a-new-line-beginning/

and you can have the dial tone fail over as well. You can do the WAN SIP route overflow yourself through routing (perhaps using optimal edge routing, BGCP …), or have the carrier do this for you. This brings the IP Office into the Enterprise space.
- An increase in extension capacity from 284 to 390.
- An increase in call center station support from 80 to 150 agents (now that’s a big call center)!
- SIP station support (it will now support SIP trunks, and SIP stations). This will require a license
- Increase in conference bridge capacity from 64 to 128.
- Support for Exchange 2008, and Microsoft support of OCS so that OCS can be the voice mail store point
- An alternate version of Phone Manager which will be entirely web based (I believe with a license). This will be called One-X desktop (or something like that). Phone Manager is still supported. I hope I can get this to work on my MAC !
- And last, but not least, a new call center package. CCC will still be around, and now Avaya has CCR (Custom Call Reporter). It’s all web based.

Avaya is now calling the system a COMMUNICATIONS SERVER.

Some of these features are licensed, and I don’t have exact pricing yet, but, will keep you posted.

Some of the details are a little sketchy – my excuse was I wasn’t paying perfect attention to the WebEx, OR, I was taking such feverish notes I wasn’t able to keep up. I think I like the latter. I will fill in the details with greater accuracy over the next few weeks, and will post that info to this BLOG.

BTW – we’ve been running the beta release 5 in our office for the last month and it’s been stable.

Expected release date is some time in August.