Introducing Strata CS Release 7.0

Transcription

1 TOSHIBA Strata CS Sales Bulletin SBCS-0018 March, 2006 It s finally here! Toshiba is excited to announce the immediate availability of Strata CS Release 7.0! Release 7.0 includes many exciting new features and functions to make the Strata CS more competitive in a challenging market. We think you will agree that with Release 7.0, Strata CS continues to be a powerful, application driven telephone system. Important! Please take a few moments and review this entire bulletin. Along with the introduction of Release 7.0, some very important business directions for Strata CS are explained. With the introduction of Strata CS Release 7.0, Toshiba is adopting a software only sales approach for the Strata CS. Only Strata CS software and licenses will be available from Toshiba. Consequently, Toshiba is formally announcing the discontinuance of all sales of Strata CS server hardware and Intel/Dialogic boards as of March 31, Any orders for these products from now through March 31 st will be filled from onhand inventory only. After March 31 st we will continue to take orders for on-hand inventory, while supplies last. Dealers are advised to contact their Dealer Sales Representative to confirm available inventory of Strata CS server and Intel/Dialogic hardware products prior to placing an order. A follow up announcement will be made with special offers for any remaining Toshiba inventory of server and Intel/Dialogic boards. There are many hardware distributors that sell servers that meet the standard hardware requirements for Strata CS. Toshiba dealers who do not already have a business relationship with a hardware distributor can contact Kristina Grogan (Kristina.Grogan@tais.toshiba.com or mbx 5148) or the Toshiba Sales Application desk for information on distributors who sell servers and Intel/Dialogic hardware. Toshiba s digital telephone station board, the DKTU, is not affected by this announcement. Dealers can continue to order DKTU boards for Strata CS using the following part number, CS-DKTU-KIT. Note Please be advised that this is a new part number for the DKTU board. It includes the requisite power supply for each board. Use the new part number when ordering the DKTU board. Release 7.0 Software A Strata CS Release 7.0 System Software Package is now available for order. The System Software Package (part number CS-R7-SW-PACK) includes: System Application software CD-ROM with a Strata CS System License Intel/Dialogic Driver CD Documentation Library CD Copyright 2006 Toshiba America Information Systems, Inc. Digital Solutions Division 9740 Irvine Blvd., Irvine, CA (949)

2 New Release 7.0 Features and Platform Support New Phone and Voic Features SIP Support- Strata CS now supports VoIP using SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) as well as H.323. Specifically, Strata CS supports a family of SIP desk phones including: CounterPath eyebeam softphone Sipura FXO and FXS ATA adapters for connecting analog stations, fax machines, trunks and SIP PSTN gateways supporting T1/E1/Analog trunks. In addition Strata CS supports SIP trunking via for full PSTN connectivity over an Internet connection. For more information, see the Strata CS Installation & Maintenance Manual and the Strata CS Administrator Manual. Aastra 480i, Aastra 9133i, and Aastra 9112i. BLF Support for Digital Phones- Busy Lamp Field (BLF) is now supported on the speed dial buttons of Toshiba digital phones. With BLF support you can see if the person designated by your speed dial button is on a call before calling them. Simplified Button Assignment - Pressing an unassigned feature or line button on a digital phone will display the button s number, making it easier to assign features to buttons using ViewPoint or the Administrator. New ViewPoint Features Call History Pane - The new Call History pane shows cradle to grave call details illustrating how each call travels through the system. Using Call History, users can see why they got a call, where the caller was before they answered including which routing list or call rule was used, if hold music was changed, call transfers, and much more! Simple Instant Messaging - ViewPoint supports simple, secure, user-to-user Instant Messaging (IM). You can right-click a user name in the Extensions list or Queue Monitor s Agent pane and select Send an Instant Message. ViewPoint IM is a simple, secure feature that operates with a valid LAN (or VPN) account. SIP Services - ViewPoint is fully SIP-aware dial any SIP URI such as sip:joe@foo.com, click to return calls or voice messages from SIP services. SIP addresses are allowed anywhere you can enter a regular phone number as long as your administrator has properly configured SIP on your system. eyebeam Softphone - Users can select the eyebeam SIP softphone as a ViewPoint log in option, when eyebeam is purchased, installed, and properly configured on the workstation with a Strata CS account. XP style icons - Windows XP-style icons have been developed for all workstation applications. Welcome Wizard - A Welcome Wizard greets new ViewPoint users and walks them through the recording of their voice title, voice mail greeting, and optional entry of their personal numbers. Desktop Alert - Desktop Alert is a ViewPoint Add-in. It lets you customize separate automatic popup windows for new calls and new voice messages. For example, you can attach custom buttons to the window to grab-and-hold a new call or send it to voic , and you can define the folders in which new activity triggers alerts. Tip of the Day - On startup of ViewPoint, a Tip of the Day is shown. Administrators can turn the Tip of the Day on or off at any time. Users can also turn it off or select it at any time from ViewPoint s Help menu. 2 of 8

3 New Call Center Features Skills Based Routing - You can distribute calls with specific skill requirements to the agent with the best matching skills. For example, Spanish-speaking callers can be routed to only Spanish-speaking agents who can process orders. Skills are a powerful way to maximize your call center resources by making sure calls go to the agents who are best equipped to handle them. Skills are defined in the system and assigned to users and queues. Auto attendants or IVR Plug-ins can assign skill requirements to incoming calls as needed. Skill Reduction allows you to reduce skill requirements over time if no agent is available and you need to get the caller to an agent regardless of skills within a certain time. No Matching Skill redirection allows you to redirect calls that have skill requirements that exceed the skills of the currently signed-in agents. Using this type of redirection (as well as Overflow agents) you will never have a caller starved and waiting on hold indefinitely for an agent. For more information, see the Strata CS Call Center Administrator Guide. Custom Call Routing - You can blend Strata CS s standard call distribution algorithms with each other and with agent attributes such cost, and skills. For example, you could blend Least talk time with a negative Agent Cost, so that your most expensive agents take fewer calls, freeing them for other tasks. For more information, see the Strata CS Call Center Administrator Guide. Skills Worksheet The new SkillsWorksheet.xls Excel spreadsheet allows you to perform What If analysis when configuring your agent skills and your queue s skills-based routing settings including skill weights. Using a spreadsheet you can see the impact of different queue configuration settings on which agent will receive which call, and which calls will be distributed first and assigned to which agent. The spreadsheet is located in the same directory as the Strata CS Administrator. See the Strata CS Call Center Administrator Guide for more information. Call Center Activity Trace - Strata CS now traces all call center queue activity to text files which shows a history of every decision made when performing skills based or regular call routing. Queue logs explain why a queue distributed a call to a particular agent, or why a call was not distributed, etc. Queue logs contain a reference to a Call ID so you can correlate individual calls back to Call Log entries in ViewPoint or the Administrator, when you show the new Call ID column. For more information, see the Strata CS Call Center Administrator Guide, Appendix A. Alternate Login Permission - Allows agents / supervisors to sign in/out other agents. Personal Status Report - Personal Status changes are now shown in the enhanced Call History by Agent Report and Agent History by Queue report. Every personal status change including custom Personal Statuses are shown for the appropriate Agent including summary information by day. New Call Center Reports - New Call Center reports have been added to report on skills-based and custom routing. The new reports include: Agent by Queue and Skill Configuration Agent Performance by Skill Call Distribution by Skill and Agent Call Distribution by Skill and Queue Call Result by Skill Queue Call History Detail Service Level by Skill Skill Assignment by Agent Lists each agent, showing the queues he or she belongs to and the skills he or she possesses. Provides summary data showing how each agent in a queue performed in a given period by skill Provides a summary of how many calls were answered per selected agents and selected skills. Provides a summary of how many calls were answered per selected queues and selected skills. Shows comparative call results for all calls with skill requirements. Shows the call history for a selected queue, including the skill requirements for each call. Shows the percentage of calls, by wait time, with a single skill requirement in a single queue that were answered, abandoned, or sent to voice mail. Shows which agents have which skills within which queues. 3 of 8

4 New System Features Recording Archive Service - A new Recording Archive Service runs on a separate server from the Strata CS Server, and uses its own MSDE or SQL Server database. The Recording Archive Service can archive mailbox recordings from multiple Strata CS Servers, as well as handle the resource-intensive archiving process without impacting Strata CS performance. MP3 is also a supported archive file format, consuming much less disk space. Recording archives from Strata CS 6 can be imported into the database using the new Archived Recording Browser. For more about archive recording, see Chapter 12 in the Strata CS Administrator Manual. Archived Recording Browser Enhancements - The Strata CS Archived Recording Browser has been enhanced with powerful search capabilities to make it easier and much faster to navigate very large recording archives, even those with a million recordings. Search on any field to locate the recordings you need and save them for later re-use. Results can be sorted by clicking on any column header, and you can annotate recordings with notes, mark important sections, and flag them for later follow up. Administrators can configure multiple Archive Recording Browser user accounts, each with unique permissions to view recordings from one or more Strata CS Servers, archived mailboxes or even calls involving individual users or contacts. For archive administrators, a Purge recordings option can delete recordings according to search criteria you specify. A Check archive option can verify the archive database contains matching recordings for every record, and clean up discrepancies. For information on using the Archived Recording Browser, see Appendix E in the Strata CS User Guide for ViewPoint. Alternative Music-on-hold - You can now choose one or more.wav or.vox audio files as a music-on-hold source. The Strata CS Administrator lets you create a sequence, or play list, of audio files. When you select the sequence as a music-on-hold source it plays continuously in order. You can use.mp3 files by converting them to.wav or.vox format first using many available after market utilities. Royalty-free Music-on-hold Source Files - Royalty free music-on-hold VOX files (classical, jazz, new age) are provided on the Strata CS Master CD in the \MusicOnHold folder of the Master CD for use with Strata CS. Multi-line TAPI Service Provider - The Strata CS Multi-line TAPI Service Provider can be installed to provide multiple users TAPI screen pops and TAPI dialing on a Citrix Server or Windows Terminal Server with TAPI compatible applications such as Act!. The Strata CS Multi-line TAPI Service Provider can be used with the Contact Manager Assistant to provide screen pops to Outlook and Goldmine as well. Strata CS still includes the basic single-line TAPI Service Provider for use on individual workstations. For more information, see the Strata CS Installation & Maintenance Manual. Trivial File Transfer Protocol Server - A TFTP Server (from ) can be optionally installed as a Windows Service to update the configurations of Aastra SIP phones and other devices. See the Strata CS Installation & Maintenance Manual, Chapter 17, for details on how to install and configure the TFTP service. VOIP Quality Testing from IP Phones - Dialing *18 from any IP phones lets you test the VoIP connection between the phone and the Strata CS Server. After dialing *18 from an IP phone, whatever you say is echoed back by the Server, letting you judge any VoIP delay and allowing to you check for two-way audio. 4 of 8

5 New Administration Features and Settings SIP Phone Management - The Strata CS Administrator creates and manages the appropriate Aastra SIP phone configuration files <mac>.cfg and Aastra.cfg. When you use the Administrator to edit an external SIP station setting and specify the Aastra SIP phone s MAC address, or when you edit SIP span settings, the appropriate configuration files are now created or updated, and are applied the next time the SIP phone is reset. You can also edit these files manually and your edits are preserved. User Templates User templates can now be created that contain collections of user settings you can apply to multiple users and roles in bulk. User templates make it easy to create users with similar settings. You can also use them to make bulk changes of individual settings to existing users. Phone Templates - Phone Templates contain collections of phone settings, organized by each phone family and model (e.g. Nortel, Toshiba, analog, etc). Once defined, pressing *0 on an unassigned extension will apply the default phone template for that device type. You can also apply phone settings to one or more users or roles to make bulk changes of individual phone settings as needed. Predefine phone templates are installed for all device types you can access these templates using Tools > Phone Templates User Import/Export - You can import users in bulk from a Windows Server s Active Directory or a CSV file using the Administrator s Import and Export menu option. When importing users, you can set all user settings (using user templates) and phone settings (using phone templates). New User Template - From File > New Users from template you can manually enter basic user details into a grid and specify corresponding user and phone templates to rapidly create many users without a CSV file or Active Directory source. RTP Relay for SIP to SIP Calls - SIP calls involving only SIP end-points are handled using off-bus routing. With off-bus routing, packets in a SIP to SIP call are routed more directly from one SIP endpoint to the other through Strata CS s RTP Relay instead of via the TDM bus of the Intel Dialogic boards. The result is higher voice quality and lower latency, and in some configurations, reduced Intel RTP resource usage. The RTP relay runs in Windows Kernel mode by default, to keep CPU usage low. DiffServ Support - DiffServ QoS is now supported on H.323 and SIP Spans and is configured using the Layer 3 QoS TOS Octet setting on the Tuning tab of the Span. Due to limitations of the Intel drivers, this feature is not available on Intel s 10BT boards (DM/IP-241-1T1-10P and DM/IP-301-1E1-10P). To use this feature your network equipment and VoIP devices must support DiffServ QoS. Please refer to and for more information. External SIP Station Authentification - SIP external stations can be authenticated based on perstation authentication settings, per-span authentication settings or user extensions and passwords. Phone Settings in Administrator - All phone settings are available in Administrator including call waiting settings. Previously some of these phone settings were only available in ViewPoint. Call History Pane - The Device Monitor has been enhanced with a Call History pane showing realtime activity on any trunk or station. Also the Administrator contains a View call history permission to determine if users have the ability to see the call history pane in ViewPoint s Call Monitor or Call Log. Active Call Duration - The Device Monitor can display the duration of any active call when you click on a trunk or station. Enhanced Dial Plan View - The Dial plan view can show entries from the perspective of the PSTN (e.g. by DID numbers) or from internal dial tone (e.g. by Extensions) Network Traffic Facility - A built-in network capture facility collects network traces in and out of the Strata CS Server for client / server communications and VoIP signaling. This facility and is on by default. It can also optionally capture RTP audio traffic as well to troubleshoot QoS issues. This ability is off by default as it requires more CPU resources. See Chapter 12 of the Strata CS Administrator Manual for details. 5 of 8

6 Performance Monitor Template - A Windows performance monitor template is installed to aid in the tracking down of any performance issues on the Strata CS Server including 3 rd party applications. See Chapter 12 of the Strata CS Administrator Manual for details. PR Wizard Changes - The PR Wizard no longer creates.cab files. It now uses improved file compression and creates.zip files that are smaller and can contain more data. The PR Wizard also can be run on an extremely busy system using the lowest priority thread, so it will not slow down the rest of the system (although it may take a long time on a busy system). New Platform Options and Capabilities Windows 2003 SP1 is officially supported for the Server and workstation applications The following Intel Dialogic boards can be used with Strata CS. For detailed board specifications, refer to the telephony board specification spreadsheet (SupportedTelephonyBoards.xls), included on the Intel Dialogic Drivers CD. DM/V480A-2T1-PCI DM/V600A-2E1-PCI DM/V960A-4T1-PCI DM/V1200A-4E1-PCI ISDN PRI T1 and E1 interfaces are supported on the following Intel Dialogic boards: DM/IP301-1E1-P100 DM/IP241-1T1-P100 DM/IP601-2E1-P100 DM/IP481-2T1-P100 DM/V600A-2E1-PCI DM/V480-2T1-PCI DM/V1200A-4E1-PCI DM/V960A-4T1-PCI The following ISDN protocols are supported on the boards listed above. Note: CAS protocols (Robbed-bit T1 and R2MF E1) are not supported on these boards): 4ESS (T1) 5ESS (T1) DMS (T1) NI2 (T1) Net5 (E1) QSIG (E1 & T1) The DSI162HMP digital station interface board and the DSI162LGNHMP digital station interface board support the Avaya, Nortel, Siemens, and NEC digital phones listed in the Strata CS Installation & Maintenance Manual. A Strata CS Dialogic Clean utility can be run to clean up / uninstall any pre-installed Intel Dialogic Drivers to prepare for installing other drivers. DM/V-A T1 and E1 boards can now be used to drive caller ID on call waiting on HDSI boards as well MSI boards. This requires a different media load which is described in Installing Intel Telephony Components. 6 of 8

7 New SDK features The Client API s call object now can return a Call. Use CallHistoryID property to get access to the corresponding call history entry (once it is logged after the call finishes). The Client API and the IVR Plug-in API have been enhanced to support reading and managing agent skills for skills-based routing. Intel Host Media Processing (HMP) Intel s Host Media Processing (HMP) architecture moves the digital signal processing (DSP) functions from hardware telephony boards to the host Intel CPU. An interface for HMP has been written into Release 7.0 core software. HMP is a system-wide configuration and cannot currently co-exist with the other telephony boards used in the Strata CS. Only SIP IP stations and trunks are available in a HMP-enabled system. Toshiba digital telephones are not supported. Toshiba believes that HMP has potential as a powerful value proposition. However, the benefits and flexibility of a traditional board based Strata CS allow it to remain a converged solution that supports digital, IP, and analog telephones without the need for additional gateway equipment. Therefore, Toshiba has elected to not offer sales or support of HMP in Release 7.0. Dealer In-house/Demo System Upgrade Promotion With the release of Strata CS Release 7.0 we are providing the opportunity for Toshiba dealers who have a Strata CS system running in their office to receive a one time upgrade of all licenses in their system to Release 7.0 licenses. This upgrade is not for resale. To obtain this upgrade, you must comply with all four of the following steps: 1. Purchase Toshiba part number CS-INHOUSE-UPG7 on Internet FYI. 2. Make note of the Toshiba order number. 3. Export a copy of the license (.LIC) text file from the targeted system. This procedure can be found on page D-8 in the Strata CS Release 7.0 Installation and Maintenance Manual, or by downloading the appropriate License Export Utility from Internet FYI. It is accessible by clicking on Technical Services\Software (Strata Systems). 4. the Toshiba order number and license file along with: a. Dealer name and number b. Dealer contact name and telephone number c. Dealer return address to: ron.hunsaker@tais.toshiba.com An containing the updated file for Release 7 licenses will be sent to the dealer return address within 5 business days. If you have any questions, please contact Ron Hunsaker, Senior Product Manager, Telecommunication Systems Division at of 8

8 Upgrading from Strata CS 3.5 or earlier If you are upgrading from Strata CS 3.5 or earlier, you must first upgrade your system to Strata CS 4, 5, or 6, and then upgrade again to Strata CS Release 7. See Strata CS Installation & Maintenance Manual (for the intermediate version that you choose to install) for details. Be sure to review Notes for specific upgrade paths in Chapter 6 (in Strata CS 6, this information was moved to Appendix F.) Documentation Strata CS Release 7.0 documentation is now available. This documentation is available in printed format, as well as in electronic format on FYI. A Strata CS R7 Documentation Library CD-ROM with all of these documents is included with each purchase of the Strata CS Release 7.0 System Software Package. Strata CS General Description Strata CS Installation & Maintenance Manual Strata CS Administrator Manual Strata CS Client User Guide Strata CS Call Center Administrator Guide Strata CS Digital Telephone User Guide Strata CS Analog Telephone User Guide New Brochure for Strata CS A new brochure for Strata CS, which includes Release 7.0 features, can be obtained in an electronic only format from our FYI website. 8 of 8