15 PC-Based Auto-Attendant Voicemail Systems Compared
by Rick Luhmann
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VSR is renowned in the industry for its highly integrated auto-attendant/voice-mail platforms, especially behind Mitel phone systems. Computer Telephony Magazine's New York office can personally attest to the power. They have used a VSR COVoice for their Mitel SX-Light PBX the last year or so. The COVoice system uses Pika's (Kanata, Ontario - 613-591-1555) TRANS-4M card to communicate directly to the switch and offset a lot of the call-control intelligence to the programmable VSR PC system. For even more computer telephony integration control, VSR also introduced Digital Link, which is the first DNIC-based integrated call-processing system. Mitel came out with DNIC to provide relativity detailed digital switch-signaling information. Voice Technologies Group...built a card that makes this available to adjunct processors. VSR is just one vendor using the resource for rather slick CTI. Again, it makes the VSR Digital Link much more than a vanilla voicemail system. Signal information sent from the PBX is intuitively analyzed and processed according to user-defined conditions. Calls are then fired off in the most intelligent way possible. No one-size-fits-all and boring auto-attendant routing. You make the decision on how you want your customers treated. Unfortunately for VSR, our testbed for this article did not include a modern Mitel phone system or any high-end call-control desires - they would have kicked butt in comparison with other vendors if it did. Fortunately, for VSR they do have a product that addresses the basic voice-mail /auto-attendant target we are looking for here. It's called the Voicentre platform. The PC is a 486 DX with a minimum of 540 MB hard-disk capacity. Monitor, keyboard and modem are included. Systems are available in 2 to 24 ports with 30 or 100 hours of voice storage. VSR uses Rhetorex cards for its media-processing chores. Fax is easily added as an option. DOS is the operating system. BASIC PHONE SYSTEM INSTALLATION AND INTEGRATION Integration is obviously something that VSR stresses - not only for performance reasons, but because their systems emphasize call-control based on channel (port) and time (of day, of week, holidays, etc.) criteria more than most commodity auto-attendant/voice-mail systems. Their documentation states they have integration guides for over 175 telephone system configurations. Minimum requirements for phone-system connectivity include the usual suspects - analog interfaces, end-to-end DTMF, hook-flash or DTMF transfer, ring voltage, hunting through the lines into the media processor, etc. They also can work with SMDI (through VTG's VoiceBridge product), specialized hardware (as is the case with most Mitel switches) and, depending on the phone system, support call-progress monitoring or straight inband signaling or both. For Toshiba DKs, you don't need any special hardware. You can go either inband for blind transfers or monitor call progress for supervised (VSR refers to it as "analyze") transfers. We, of course, wanted to set up blind transferring, since it's much more efficient. So it was inband all the way (more soon). After everything is plugged in (including the analog-port connections between Voicentre and phone system extensions) and you fire up Voicentre for the first time, you're booted up into the system's External Maintenance utility - basically your screen-based programming tool. Its GUI is more intuitive than a lot of the other DOS packages in this comparison. It's mostly cursor-keying through drop-down menus and okaying default options. To begin a new install, go to Utilities in the main External Maintenance screen and select Quick Setup. This is a very nice program that gets you started on the right foot. It establishes some basic system defaults, builds your initial extension and mailbox ranges and sets up the operator station and general mailbox. Many things are plugged in right here, including stuff like working hours for the company, notification methods you'll be using, number of rings in ring-no-answer, number of digits for extension and mailboxes, etc. Also included here is a selection for "phone system". F2ing pops us a scrollable list of available phone systems (starting with the Alcatel ITT 3100). Most phone systems you've ever heard of are here (remember Sun Moon Star?), including the Toshiba DK16 (but not 16e) and DK280 (which we selected). Picking a system builds a tone table for that particular switch and programs Voicentre's "Phone System Editor" with as much information as possible, including the signals to turn on and off message-waiting lamps and something they call "masks" and "functions" for inband signaling. Once you're done with the Quick Setup (really quick, took us about 10 minutes to go through it completely cold), skip to Chapter 6 in their Installer's Guide. You're about to enter the dreaded world of computer telephony "integration", though VSR makes it about as simple as possible - once you get the gist of it. Again, the best method for working with a Toshiba system is through inband signaling, which VSR naturally allows. This signaling means you're talking to the phone system over the same circuit as the talk path. You're also talking with DTMF tones. Programming inband signaling within Voicentre sounds spookier than it is. Reading about it in the manual had us lost. But after spending a few minutes with ace VSR tech support man, Richard Gertz, we were on or way. First, from the External Maintenance program, go to Utilities/Low Level and open the In-Band Mask Editor. Despite its eerie name, this template-styled screen simply sets up inband signals for Voicentre to "listen" for. In their main documentation, VSR say you can have up to 20 of these inband signaling "masks". But since we'd already told Voicentre we were talking Toshiba DK280, it filled in only three crucial things to look for: call-forwarding information (the "follow-on" gig); automatic login to a specific voice mailbox (happens after a phone's "message" key is pressed); and positive disconnect (hangup). It also set up the format of how this information is sent to Voicentre. For example, call forwarding comes as 8EE - the DTMF tone 8 followed by the two-digit EE (extension) number (it would have been 8EEE, but we set up the Toshiba to have two - not three - digit extensions). You then define what Voicentre should do in the In-Band Signaling Editor once it runs into these masks. At first, each says "not defined." But all you do is toggle through self-explanatory definitions - like play mailbox greeting when you get a call forwarded mask or login onto voice mail when a message-key is punched, etc. Note: You have to define actions for "all times" and "all channels" on the VSR system or else you'll get an error message when you try to quit out of the In-Band Signaling Editor. This was clear in the special Toshiba integration guide VSR sent us, but we missed it in their main installer's guide. The roadblock sent us to Mr. Gertz, who quickly showed us how to use a "copy" feature to finish the inband signaling definition task. Richard, who trains dealers on the Voicentre platform, also explained the whole process in terms that made a lot more sense to us than the manual: "Think of us as a digit-grabber in this case. When we sense a ring, we go offhook and grab any digits the phone system throws us and study their format. We then look for matches we defined in our 'mask' editor. When we hit on one, the steps defined in the 'signal' editor tell the system what to do." The final integration/installation step is programming the Toshiba system to conform to the inband signaling formats you set up. This means you're not just programming the extensions to forward to the first hunt-port on the voice-mail system when ring-no-answer or busy; you're also telling it to preface the call-forward information (the extension number) with, in this case, the DTMF digit 8. We don't want to even get into the awkward touchtone programming sequences this requires (spelled out in VSR's special DK integration notes). Needless to say, it's a fact of life when it comes to working with traditional phone systems. (Who would ever guess that a phone's "redial" key would essentially become the programming equivalent of an "enter" key?) After we muddled through it, Voicentre was ready to go. The combo of Quick Setup and the inband integration procedure leaves you with a fully functional system. Boot up. SCORE: 95. This is a high score for this category in general and especially when you consider we're talking DOS GUI setup software and an integration chapter in the installer's manual that left us more befuddled than it should have. The good mark is granted for four reasons: first, Quick Setup is a Godsend - fast and easy; second, VSR obviously built in a lot of integration blood and sweat into their source code; third, the software integrated well (with successful blind transfers and message-waiting-lamp illumination) right off the bat; and, fourth, setting it all up was actually easier than the dreaded Chapter 6 suggested . . .Voicentre essentially took care of all that nonsense for us, once we selected the phone system in the External Maintenance program (why didn't it tell us?). All in all, it's about as turnkey as it gets - but you will have to know phone systems. Then again, anytime a phone system is nearby, you will, unfortunately, have to know it. ADMINISTRATIVE INTERFACE After running Quick Setup, you've already programmed Voicentre enough to run as a standalone, pretty much standard voice-mail/auto-attendant system. For example, you've already set up a range of mailboxes and defined basic routing. Sorted generic prompts are defaulted in all the right places. Exhausted from our first programming bout with the Toshiba, we still managed a few of the tasks a typical administrator would perform in order to fine tune Voicentre - record a couple of new prompts, set up class of services, muck about with the (many) message notification and channel-control options, etc. You can program the system from either the already familiar (you used it for Quick Setup and integration/installation) External Maintenance screen (offline) or online from the administrator's mailbox via touchtone commands. Neither way is particularly thrilling. You'll need to keep the manual handy the first few times. Note: If you want to make changes with the External Maintenance program, you must bring down the system, get to a DOS prompt and run e.exe. Simply resetting or rebooting won't help with a Voicentre PC. It merely slaps you immediately into the system's runtime. The only way to quit out to DOS is by pressing "shift F10" . . . SCORE: 85. Almost as good as it gets form DOS. The nice thing is that the Quick Setup program has already taken care of a lot of the boring administration tasks new systems require. Well documented too. FEATURE PACKAGE It covers all the basics. Up to 1,000 mailboxes, multiple language capability, distribution lists, caller queuing and screening, etc. Things we liked: advanced message notification to up to 10 different internal/external phone numbers; simple mailbox activation - tutorial prompts first time subscribers as they set up their very own boxes; and an easy-to-set-up Q & A app, where you can ask callers up to 99 questions in a single box, with their answers coming either through voice or touchtones. SCORE: 85 DOCUMENTATION Despite the fact we got lost in Chapter 6 in the installer's manual, VSR still had one of the best documentation packages of any of the systems in this comparison. Lots and lots of tutorial information is sprinkled throughout. There are also special tip boxes that break up the gray type. A separate little pamphlet-type user guide makes for a nice cubby-stuffer. SCORE: 90. Whenever you're talking phone-system integration, it's difficult not to be confusing. We realize this, especially after re-reading this article. So we don't want to give VSR too much grief over Chapter 6. We also did run into the great "Shift F10" debacle. Working from the installer's manual, we went through Quick Setup. No prob. 10 minutes. Then we fired up the system (before we were told to) to check it out. Uh oh. No integration. So we needed to get to DOS and the External Maintenance program to get that working. REPORTS There some decent reports that show exactly how different parts of your system are set up. There are also a few that give you the parameters on the big picture. Voicentre also keeps logs of all its transactions. Though hardly intuitive (they're coded), a keen eye can spot trouble by reviewing them. The system, of course, shows you real-time system performance on all is channels as it processes calls. SCORE: 90. Extra points for the call logging, which also shows up in real-time in the system's channel-monitor screen. PRICING BONUS POINTS: 10. Suggested retail for a turnkey four-port/thirty-five-hour Voicentre like the one we tested is only $3,500. That's a sweet deal on a system like this. |