Avaya IPO with Norstar Phones - Tips? 11

[SHS1977]

I am fairly new with IPO and will be working with my technicians to deploy a 500v2 Release 8.1 IP Office with VM PRO soon. The customer has 80 Norstar digital telephones (M7324, M7310, T7316, M7208, T7406) that will come over to the new system along with 15 new softphones, 24 new Avaya digital sets and 8 Avaya IP phones. We are moving to a 4-digit dialing plan and eventually will connect this site to a BCM450 in another town via a Metro Ethernet connection so we will be in IP Office Mode. The customer is a 24X7 operation so minimal down time is a must.

With this said, I am looking for tips and cautions beyond what is in the knowledge base as it relates to working with designing templates for the Norstar phones, things to watch out for, issues that other have encountered such as needing to have the Global release of telephone (where the contrast setting goes clear to 9), etc. I will be flying to meet with the customer soon to go over their database requests and want to be sure I do not offer features/functionality that will not work well for the end user.

Any input from those who have been through this already is greatly appreciated.

 

[phoneguy610]

so far we have about 10 ipos out there with t series nortel phones on them

doing another one this weekend with about 60 t series phones from a bcm400


i have not had any problems with the phones besides the whole changing how call park works on the

 

[Greybeard191]

SHS1977:

here's one "option" for call park on the IPO that actually works reasonably well if you're trying to transition from the Nortel world.

On the reception set, or whichever sets do the parking, put call park buttons (as many as are required for system). Label them as Call Park 101, 102 etc, and you can call the action data for the button the same thing.

Build a complementary set of SC's
*101
Call Park
101

and

#101
unpark call
101

etc.

Receptionist can park to a button labelled 101, then page and announce the park, and anyone can hit #101 and unpark the correct parked call.

It's not perfect, but it's close, and it works quite well if you have a bunch of phones that don't have the button space for call park keys and if one person, or a small group of people are the "parkers". The real "fail" in this scheme is that a user without visibility of the park buttons doesn't know what park slots are free (the nortel system would autoassign park slot numbers).

GB

 

[tlpeter]

GreyBerard,

Make only two shortcodes like this:

*1XX
Call Park
1N
0
and

#1XX
Unpark Call
1N
0


Even better, give the receptionst the softconsole/Receptionist tool.
This tools has call park buttons on the screen (bottom)


BAZINGA!

I'm not insane, my mother had me tested!

 

[Saiyan656]

...and don't forget about the 1120 ip sets. That's when things get real interesting...

 

[amriddle01]

Believe it or not Avaya made the features and functions of the IPO to suite its own handsets, of which the biggest selling had plenty of spare buttons to allow park slots to be allocated, when you have spare buttons the way Avaya park slots work is far easier and better then the Nortel method

 

[Greybeard191]

tlpeter,

go idea, don't know why I didn't think of the XX and N thing.

We've sold Softconsole software to a number of companies, and no one ended up continuing to use it. They all ended up going to 1416/DBM32's or the like. The receptionists are often asked to do different tasks (beside answer the phone) and didn't like the real estate it consumed, or how it intruded on their desktop when calls came in.

We still sell it, but no one wants to use it. Those that try it, stop using it shortly.

GB

 

[amriddle01]

You can stop it popping up when a call comes in, it's just a tick box in the settings

 

[Greybeard191]

yeah, I know, but then they still have to open it then minimize it again to go back to what they were doing.

People have tried it, played around with it, I don't know of a single site that bought it that ended up continuing to use it. We went back and put big phones + BM's at a number of them.

I guess if you had a dedicated receptionist who just ran that on their PC they might keep it, but no one we sell to seems to do that.

Maybe it's intruding on their facebook posts ;-)

GB